Gewürztraminer

Best served slightly chilled, especially in summer.

Gewürztraminer (German spelling, with the umlaut) pronounced Ger-vuers-tramier (as close as I could get to the Maltese tongue), wines are perfumed, golden, full-bodied wines that can improve greatly with age. Presenting an intense nose of dried rose petals and ginger, followed by lychee (those waxy red Chinese fruits), pineapple and a hint of incense on the palate. It can be said that Gewürztraminer has plenty of character. Wine consumers who like exotic flavours generally love Gewürztraminer. The aromas and flavours are extroverted. Litchi nuts, gingerbread, vanilla, fruit-cocktail syrup, grapefruit (sometimes), smoke, spice, minerals, and honeysuckle do not simply rest in the glass, they rage about in it.

The famous spiciness is derived from terpenes, which are found in the grape’s skins. The grapes have to be ripe, otherwise the wine will just have a soft rose-petal character. Additionally the wine must not be acid-adjusted or the spice will lack breadth and potential complexity. Such massive fruitiness is sometimes, wrongly, mistaken for sweetness, but should not be, unless a late harvest wine is being made. In Malta sales over the last 20 years or so have exceeded percentage expectations in all the retail segments.

Gewürztraminer’s home turf spreads across the foothills of the Alps into Italy, Germany and over to Alsace in France, as well as into Austria. Gewürztraminer is particularly fussy about soil and climate. The vine is vigorous, even unruly, but it hates chalky soils and is very susceptible to disease. It buds early, so is very susceptible to frost, needs dry and warm summers, and ripens erratically and late. Usually presented in tall, fluted Alsace-style bottles with an association with white wines of German heritage, such as Riesling.

The world’s most complex and breathtaking dry Gewurztraminer wines are made in France in Alsace where this grape makes lush, power-house wines that taste surprisingly dry with overtly floral flavours and uncommonly low levels of acidity. Foods that are higher in flavour intensity, like smoked salmon, blue cheese or Asian kitchen, tend to taste better with wines of similar aromatic amplitude, like Gewurztraminer, Cabernet Sauvignon or Gros Manseng. In Alsace, Gewurztraminer’s gripping flavours have a finesse and a complexity rarely seen elsewhere. Alsatian vineyards even make dessert wines from Gewürztraminer, because the grapes can survive into late harvest there. These wines are more expensive, as they require harvesting individual bunches of botrytised grapes by hand.

It loves the cool breezes sweeping through Austria’s vineyards, where it takes a Moscato-like floral perfume. The outcome is unusually dense and flavourful white wines that may be fully dry or lightly sweet. Germany, with a cold climate like Alsace, also makes delicious examples, usually in Baden, Pfalz, Sachsen. Some of these, especially the lower quality ones, may not be Gewürztraminer itself, but instead Red Taminer or Savagnin rose (see below). One can find also find the grape variety in California and New York State (United States of America). Italy uses the name Traminer Aromatico for its (dry) versions. Canada grows these in the West, British Columbia, Vancouver area. Luxembourg has also been prominent in the production of wines with Gewürztraminer grapes.

Gewurztraminer (English and French spelling) is a descendent of another grape variety, Traminer (tram-ih-nher or trah-mee-nher). Traminer is another old white grape variety showing primitive characters. It is valued mainly for its strong aromatic character in making white wine and, as there are large clonal differences in this respect, the more aromatic clones are sometimes distinguished as Gewürztraminer. The prefix Gewürz means spice in German, and though most professionals describe the wine as spicy, the kitchen spice rack is not what they have in mind. Rather, Gewürztraminer is spicy in the sense that its aromas are perfumed and its flavours are saucy, bold, kinetic, and extroverted. Being a specialised variety there are modest plantings in Germany, Austria, France and California. There are only about 20,000 acres of Gewürztraminer vineyard in the entire world. The variety has been in Australia for a long time but only in relatively small quantities. Wines from Traminer grown in hot climates are likely to be undistinguished, although this is not always the case. Under cooler conditions, and particularly when the berries are infected with noble rot, it can give luscious wines with an intense, spicy varietal character. In the northern Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige (Südtirol), it is the source of delicious, exotically aromatic wines. It is also grown in Austria.

The history of the Traminer family is complicated, and not helped by its rather flexible genome (some say unstable) and the fact that the regions in question have been in conflict, changing from one Principality or Duchy to another, one country to another, for millennia. Many consider that the Traminers should be regarded as a family of related clones, rather than distinct varieties. The actual origins are not know, though the grape takes its name from the village of Tramin, located in South Tyrol, the German-speaking province in northern Italy. It is currently thought that Traminer is an ancient spin off from Savagnin blanc, itself also thought to be the ancestor of Sauvignon blanc.
Traminer was recorded in Tramin from ca. 1000 until the 16th century. It was spread down the Rhine to Alsace, where Gewürz was added to its name – presumably this was when one of the mutations happened. The longer name was first used in Alsace (then under German rule) in the 1870’s. It is not clear what this name change represents, as it seems too great a coincidence that the musqué mutation happened just after the arrival of the great phylloxera epidemic. More likely, an existing mutant was selected for grafting onto phylloxera-resistant rootstocks when the vineyards were replanted. In 1973 the name Traminer was discontinued in Alsace except for in the Heiligenstein area.

Although Gewürztraminer makes white wine, the berries are a sort of pink in colour, which lends to the wine’s rose-gold tint. Traminer grapes are white, in contrast.

Gewürztraminer has so many synonyms and so many reasons for the synonyms that a full book can be written just about these. Please refer to the references, below, or, better still, take a car (or train, better still) and visit all the areas mentioned above to speak to the locals. We are not going to list them, lol.

See also other floral wines : Moscato/Muscat, Viognier, Fiano, Pinot Grigio or Pinot Gris, Malvasia
References:
Vines for wines. ISBN-10: 0-643-09218-8 https://www.publish.csiro.au/book/4760 and https://books.google.com.mt/books?vid=ISBN9780643099777&redir_esc=y
The Wine Bible. ISBN-10: 0-7611-8083-4 (2nd Edition) https://books.google.com.mt/books/about/The_Wine_Bible.html?id=pWHVBgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewürztraminer