The original great Gewürz?

Gewürztraminer is an especially aromatic mutation of Traminer, which quite logically the winemakers of Tramin in the German-speaking Alto Adige claim as their own. Yet in the 1850s a visiting German expert reported that he couldn’t find a single Traminer vine in the region. Strange…

Before there was Traminer the grape, there was Traminer the wine. Famed in the Middle Ages, this was an aromatic sweet wine made around Tramin from several varieties. (Chief among them was Muscat, an ancient grape and perhaps the only one to rival Gewürz for aromatic intensity.) In Traminer-the-grape’s true homeland on the French-German border, locals borrowed the name to piggyback on the fame of the wine from Tramin.

But there’s plenty of Gewürz planted around Tramin now, and it’s ideally suited to the high mountain valleys that are cool yet reliably dry and sunny. This wine has the classic Gewurz perfume of lychee and rose petals, yet its intense tropical fruit palate is refreshingly dry and followed up by a long spicy finish.

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