ALSACE
Alsace has been doing something for decades that nearly all other winemaking areas of the world just recently have caught onto: allow both the grapes and the soil on which they grow to express themselves in the purest way possible.
In addition, Alsace has always aimed for what even more winemakers are beginning to see as the goal of any wine; they’re meant less to be drunk than to be eaten. Cleanness of flavor, bracing acidity, and near-total dryness are hallmarks of Alsace wines, and the main reason they so well accompany food.
To achieve both of these, their signal characteristics, Alsace winemakers by and large neither use new oak barrels (for either fermentation or aging); nor introduce non-indigenous yeasts; nor blend grape varieties. Alsace is all about purity of flavor.
A white house
But for a small amount of Pinot Noir, Alsace wines are white. And, as a twist on standard French wine nomenclature, the labels on Alsace wines read firstly of the grape variety, then the appellation controlee (which is always, simply, “Alsace”). This makes Alsace wines very easy to understand for non-French wine drinkers who, by and large, also name their own wines after grape varieties.
These are the major white grapes of Alsace: (1) Gewurztraminer: Buckets of aroma and flavor (lichee fruit, rosewater, orange blossom, citrus peel, gingerbread, and, sometimes, smoke). (2) Muscat: Almost always dry, not off-dry as most of the world’s muscats, with powerful aromas and tastes of orange, citrus, rose and sometimes peaches. (3) Pinot blanc: Deliciously simple wine, with a cream-like roundness to its main flavor of cooked apple; the perfect aperitif. (4) Pinot Gris: Mix equal parts of scents and flavors of honey, musk, mango, and spice—all writ large—and you have Alsace’s most unique wine. (5) Riesling: The most prestigious of Alsace grapes, with terrifically tangy acidity, and tastes of lime, green apples, minerals, and perhaps white peach.
The vineyards of Alsace run in a long, thin strip, north to south, along the eastern slopes of the Vosges Mountains, which protect Alsace from western prevailing weather and make these vineyards (surprisingly) the driest in France. Although very far north for grape growing and, consequently, a cold growing region, the area is sunny and the season is long.
Alsace soil types are quite varied, ranging from chalk, clay, limestone, granite, volcanic, and more. This quilt of soil types gives rise not only to various “terroirs” for the panoply of grapes as well as to more choice vineyard sites than others. More than 50 of these special sites have been collected as “grand cru” vineyards; in short, grand cru vineyards give wines that are more intense and structured than normal Alsace wines.
Vendage Tardive (VT) and Sélection de Grains Nobles (SGN)
Made only of Gewurztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Gris or Muscat, these late-harvest wines (vendage tardive means “late-harvest”) are magnificent liquid power. VT wines can be dry or slightly sweet and are truly best by themselves.
SGN (“grapes affected with botrytis cinerea—‘noble rot’—selected by hand”) are always sweet, ravishing, and with such acidity that they may seem to finish dry.
Alsace and eats
Cleanness of flavor, bracing acidity, and near-total dryness are hallmarks of Alsace wines—and the reasons they so well accompany food.
With the exception of Paris, no area of France surpasses Alsace as a food lover’s paradise (if such a claim can be parsed from such a country). Salivate over this mere list: Munster cheese, foie gras (in myriad forms), kugelhopf—the turban-shaped bread made, seemingly, of but eggs, butter and air—April’s asparagus, choucroute garnie, trout poached in Riesling, quiche lorraine, and any number of dishes of meats and sausages made with the abundant game from the bordering Vosges mountains.
Alsatian wines are engineered precisely with such cuisine in mind. Their exquisite dryness, fruitiness, and verve have but one aim: to play deliciously at table. And because Alsace cooking is so diverse, Alsace wines marry well with many of the world’s other cuisines.
For example, sushi, sashimi, and Thai and Chinese cooking are notoriously difficult to pair with wine (the reason many people simply settle for beer). But Sylvaner, Riesling, or Pinot Blanc from Alsace all fit the bill of fare.
Other Alsace wines at-the-ready: As apéritif wines, little bests Crémant d’Alsace, Muscat, or Pinot Blanc; serve Riesling or Sylvaner with lighter styled fish preparations, and Gewurztraminer or Pinot Gris with fuller renditions; Pinot Blanc and Muscat with cold starters; Pinot Gris with pork or veal; and nearly any Alsace white with poultry, depending on the strength of flavor in both.
Desserts generally pair easily with sélection de grains nobles wines—and vendage tardive wines are dessert unto themselves. And, of course, Munster isn’t Munster without dry Gewurztraminer.
* A second fermentation that changes and softens a wine’s malic acid (from malum, Latin for apple) into lactic acid (like that in milk).