Gewurztraminer

Gewurztraminer is the most immediately identifiable white wine in the world, and it divides drinkers more sharply than almost any other grape. Gewürz means spice in German, and the name is a qualifier attached to Traminer, the older variety from the village of Tramin in Alto Adige from which it mutated.

It is not a white grape in the usual sense: the skins are pink to coppery, and left on the juice they can tint the wine. Its aromatic compounds are dominated by terpenes, the same family responsible for the smell of roses and lychees, and at high concentration the effect is unmistakable — lychee, rose petal, Turkish delight, ginger, allspice and a heady, almost perfumed quality that can seem synthetic to people who dislike it.

The technical difficulty is acidity, of which it has very little. Gewurztraminer accumulates sugar fast and loses acid faster, which is why it is usually high in alcohol, often fourteen per cent or more, and why in warm climates it turns oily and heavy. Alsace is the benchmark precisely because it is cool enough to slow that down, and the granite and marl-limestone grand crus give wines with enough structure to carry the perfume.

The grape has one genuinely great food pairing: Munster, the pungent washed-rind cheese of the Vosges, which nothing else handles as well. It also works with aromatic South Asian and South East Asian cooking, where its perfume matches rather than fights the spice.

Alto Adige, Germany's Pfalz, Austria, New Zealand and Chile all grow it; Alsace remains its home.

The low acidity is the technical fact that governs everything else about it. Without acid to provide lift, a ripe Gewurztraminer can turn oily and tiring within half a glass, and this is the most common failure of the variety in warm climates. Alsace works because it is cool enough to slow sugar accumulation and because the best grand cru sites — Hengst, Goldert, Zinnkoepflé — have the structure to carry the perfume.

Many Alsace Gewurztraminers carry noticeable residual sugar without saying so on the label, which is a long-standing complaint. A wine sold as dry may finish with ten or fifteen grams, and there is no consistent convention.

The pink skins mean extended contact produces a deeply coloured and quite tannic wine, and skin-contact Gewurztraminer has become a small but real category in Alto Adige and among natural producers. It is a divisive wine even by the standards of a divisive grape.