Amazing Italian Gewurztraminer

You know, I think Oddbins may be back on form. I’m having quite a bit of joy with their wines of late. And now their 20% discount applies to six-bottle purchases, making their pricing pretty good. The latest? An interesting Italian mountain white.

Andrian Gewürztraminer 2008 Südtirol, Alto Adige, Italy
14% alcohol. Wonderful stuff: richly textured and grapey with sweet lychee notes. The palate is rounded and off-dry with a spicy, Turkish delight edge, as well as notes of melon, grape and lychee. Thick and intense with lovely personality. Quite Alsace like in style, with good acidity and some minerality. 91/100 (£13.99 Oddbins, but £11.16 with six-bottle purchases)

Neglected Alsace

Over the last couple of nights I've been enjoying an Alsace white, and wondering why I don't drink more Alsace wines. This isn't the best wine in the world, by any measure, but it's really good. The exciting thing is that there are loads more better than this out there, I'm sure.

Jean Becker Gewurztraminer 2006 Alsace, France
An organic wine, this is deliciously balanced and rounded. It shows grape, melon and lychee aromas with a smooth, textured palate. There's also a distinctive tangerine character here. It's off-dry but not at all cloying. A benchmark Gewurz with some spicy minerality on the finish. 90/100 (£10.99 Oddbins)

London rain, again

It rained again today. With the odd exception - Sunday and Tuesday, and I think there was a day the previous week - it has rained every day for as long as I remember. And we've only got another month of summer left. I'm beginning to feel a sense of loss. We Brits love to talk about the weather, and we've had plenty to talk about in recent years. Pictured is the view up Portland Place at about 4 pm, looking towards RIBA.

Tonight I sip Tesco Alsace Gewurztraminer 2005. It's pretty good: there's peach and melon on the nose with just a hint of ripe grape and lychee. The palate is thick-textured and just off-dry, but with nice freshness, too. It's clean, fruity and quite pure, with lovely density.

Gewurztraminer

Fiona and I suffered West Wing withdrawal bravely for three days, before I snapped and purchased the box set of the second series (£29.99 from Borders - and on ebay these are selling for £25, so I think I'll recoup most of this outlay). So last night and tonight we saw four episodes in all.

Back to wine. Now Gewurztraminer isn't a grape I have a great deal of affection for, but I'm drinking two rather different but brilliant expressions of this variety at the moment. Both are from the Alsace region, and are available from UK supermarket Morrisons. The first is the Preiss-Zimmer Gewurztraminer 2004, which is sealed with a saranex-lined screwcap (this allows a little more ox-trans than the more commonly encountered tin-lined cap). It's full flavoured, perfumed and has lots of the typical Gewurz lychee fruit. Good acidity offsets the richness nicely, and it's sort of dry. A really useful food wine (£6.99).

The second is the Cave de Turckheim Grand Cru Brand Gewurztraminer 2002, and it's brilliant, with lots of apricot, peach and lychee fruit. It's fat, viscous and quite sweet, but with good spice and acid providing balance. Certainly a sweet wine, but not a dessert wine. Well worth the £13.99 price ticket.

How do you use these wines? The dogma is that Gewurz works with spicy food. I think these would also be OK with anything rich and fatty. The latter wine, being richer and sweeter, would also do the classic foie gras combination quite well.