Gewurztraminer Vendanges Tardives

Vendanges tardives means late harvest, and in Alsace it is a legally defined category with minimum sugar levels that are among the strictest in France. The grapes are left on the vine well beyond normal picking, shrivelling and concentrating, sometimes with noble rot and sometimes simply through passerillage — drying on the vine without fungal help.

Gewurztraminer is the most obviously suited of the four varieties permitted. It is already the most aromatic grape in Alsace, and concentration turns its perfume from assertive to overwhelming in the best possible way: lychee, rose petal, Turkish delight, candied ginger, mango and a heady, almost oily floral intensity.

The grape's weakness is acidity, of which it has very little, and in a late-harvest wine that becomes the central technical problem. Without acid, sweetness turns flabby and cloying. The best producers manage it by picking from cooler, higher sites and by restraint about how far they let the sugar run. The results are rich and unctuous but still lifted; the weaker examples are heavy and tiring after half a glass.

The wines are not always fully sweet. Vendanges tardives is defined by sugar in the grape, not the finished wine, and some producers ferment to near-dryness, producing a powerful, almost dry wine of enormous aromatic intensity and thirteen or fourteen degrees of alcohol.

Sélection de Grains Nobles is the level above, requiring botrytised fruit selected berry by berry, and is sweeter, rarer and more expensive.