The trouble with Alsace

Much as I enjoy a summer glass of Alsace wine, I am less puzzled than I once was by the marketing problems it has to face in Britain.  It’s not just that these wines are hybrids, admittedly delicious ones, which are not quite German and not quite French, from vineyards on land famously fought over by opposing German and French armies  Sipped appreciatively in the hilly villages of the Alsace countryside  itself, or in a good restaurant in the fine old town of Colmar,  they are an almost unfailing delight. It’s when you drink them elsewhere that doubts can arise, which is why our supermarkets have such trouble selling them to the British public.

Waitrose’s latest Alsace wine, a not inexpensive Riesling from the Cave de Beblenheim, puts the problem in perspective.  For me it is simply too sweet, with none, or almost none, of the drier, underlying, fascinating secondary flavours which, according to Alsace specialists,  make these wines the subtle experience they are. There was hardly a dish I could think of with which I would have fancied drinking this wine last night, other perhaps than foie gras, for which there are not many customers in Britain.

Rieslings, it’s true, tend towards sweetness, but it is their complexity of taste that makes good ones interesting. Yet here was one, priced like most Alsace wines above the £10 mark, I simply did not like, though it was surely a good one.  What was the matter with it - or with me?

 Waitrose stock a better range of Alsace wines than most supermarkets, and perhaps I would have done better to choose one of the fashionable Gewurztraminers, with their Chinese taste of lychees, which most people seem to prefer these days, and of which Waitrose sell two examples. The difference between a Gewurztraminer made from genuine Alsace grapes, and a cruder one from, say, somewhere in Eastern Europe is significant in my experience, and shows why Alsace wines are rated so highly by those who admire them.

Raeburn Fine Wines in Stockbridge have long been one of Edinburgh’s most comprehensive Alsace stockists, with an impressive list of Rolly-Gassmann bottles. Before I decide that my enthusiasm for Alsace is waning, I must go down there again - or to Peter Green in Marchmont, also notable for its Alsace selection -  and stock up.  My suspicion is that Alsace is not a supermarket wine, even perhaps at Waitrose.
11 July 2014