The great fun of running a blog for nearly four years is that you can contradict yourself. In 2009 I wrote this pithy review of a trade tasting of Alsace wines here in Warsaw. Last Thursday, Alsace was in town again (with largely the same wines), and I tasted through 80 bottles without finding a single bad one. Is it just me, or have the wines improved so markedly?
Cheap and cheerful: sub-7€ Alsace.
They have. It is particularly obvious at the bottom end. Basic bottlings from large producers and coops are nicer to drink than ever before (before, it often was a hit-and-miss affair). I’ve had good fun with the wines of Preiss-Zimmer, for example: a label of the large Cave de Turckheim coop, the basic Sylvaner and Pinot Blanc both retailing below 10€ here on Poland showed good fruit and definition, and even the grand cru Riesling and Gewurztraminer exceeded expectations. Another example is Domaine Rieflé, a producer with some pretty good grands crus but underwhelming basic wines, in the past. This time I really enjoyed their wines: very well-balanced between acidity and sugar, with delicious fruit and some real elegance; the 2011 Pinot Gris being the best.
Crazy: oxidised Pinot Gris.
The other noteworthy thing is how drier Alsace wines are becoming. An average bottle of Pinot Gris or Gewurztraminer will still oscillate between 10 and 25 g of sugar, but otherwise wines are now firmly in the ‘harmoniously dry’ category but soft but unsugary fruit. And some are actually quite tense and vibrant, such as Rieflé’s 2008 Grand Cru Steinert Riesling, Guy Wach’s 2010 Kastelberg Riesling, or Zind-Humbrecht’s 2010 Turckheim Riesling. These wines show the Riesling grape at what it really is: a structured, austere wine destined for long ageing and fine foods. That’s actually a move back in the right direction, because 6 or 7 years ago Alsace Riesling was often overripe, plump and sweetish, such as this Schaetzel and Weinbach wine I reviewed.
Lawless: late-harvest Pinot Blanc.
General trends aside, Alsace remains the land of individualism, and I delighted in a good number of freakish, engaging bottles at this tasting. Patrick Meyer aged his 2009 Pinot Gris N.O. in unfilled oak barrels (and no SO2), resulting in a controlled oxidation that pushed the wine near a Jura vin jaune. Jean-Michel Deiss, in a region of varietal wines, mixed all kinds of grapes in his impressively concentrated, sappy 2009 Langenberg. Marc Kreydenweiss produced a bone-dry mineral Riesling but his next bottle was a crazy late-harvest botrytised Pinot Blanc that went beyond what French legislation had programmed (Pinot Blanc cannot be made as a vendange tardive): with fantastic intensity of baked apple flavour and a never-ending finish, the 2009 Clevner Kritt is a great bottle of juice.
Disclosure
All the above wines were tasted at a public event.
A great post, thanks for sharing. Love to hear that Alsace has also many different ways to walk & there are some non-traditional producers.
I like comparing the Matra Hills in Hungary to Alsace sometimes, and a touch of uniqueness & excitment would come in handy for comparison.
I recently had a bottle of Domaine Ostertag Heissenberg Riesling 2009 and immediately thought of Busoni’s opera, Docktor Faust, which I have been listing to lately. The wine tasted both baroque and post-
romantic, it didn’t have the bright flavor nuances but had massive
structural core that burned like the thermonuclear core of a red star.
We tasted this blind so I wasn’t aware of the label with bright sun and the name of the producer. Other members of my tasting group were not so impressed, however. They were not convinced of my idea of the structural core of the wine that is not the acidic or tannic structure.
What do you think? Do you think there is such a thing as mineral structural core in wine? Also, do you think the knowledge of music or art is detrimental or beneficial to the appreciation of wine? Maybe I overestimated the quality of Ostertag’s wine because I draw a parallel to the piece of music I have been listening to?
@Jung Kim: thanks for the very interesting comment! I really like your description of Ostertar as a red star! BTW Heissenberg means “hot hill”, so your intuition mirrors that of the Medieval monks who identified the crus of Alsace.
More seriously, there are several scientific studies that show that background music or background colours can subtantially influence the sensory experience of a wine. So perhaps your recent immersion in Busoni, which is very structural, harmonic and contrapuntal music, also influenced your experience of that Riesling. And of course there is such a thing as a mineral core to wine. Technically it is extract, which is concentration independent of tannins or acids. Many whites wines have this, which are not tannic, and aren’t necessarily acidic, such as Burgundy Chardonnay. On the sensory level it is an impression of concentration and tactile solidity, which when slightly salty or delivering an impression of coolness is described as minerality. I haven’t tasted this particular 2009 from Ostertag but his wines usually have a lot of mineral extract! So I agree 100%.
Thank you for your interpretation of the mineral core. I find it extraordinarily difficult to convey this quality to other tasters, even the most brilliant ones. In my experience, the most minerally concentrated wines are those of the White Burgundy and Loire Valley whites of old-vine. Yet There is no scientific evidence that minerals can be absorbed by the roots and be released into the grape, right? Do you know of Randall Graham of Bonny Doon’s experiment on mineral density? By the way, the most “musical” wine I have ever tasted was Georges Vernay Cote Rotie Maison Rouge 2005, it resonated with such a powerful Chopinesque spirit that I thought I was tasting Chopin’s third sonata!