I l-o-v-e love love love Gewurztraminer. If gewurz (say it like "geh-vertz") were a woman I would marry it. Unfortunately, she probably wouldn't have me, because she's a bit higher class than I am. And that means that I can't afford a lot of the wines that are worth having, like the very good to great ones from Alsace. (If you ever get a chance to taste, or--bless you--consume a bottle of--a Schlumberger reserve please, please do.) If you don't know what it means to say a wine has a "good nose" get a bartender to pour you a glass of an Alsatian Gewurz. They smell flowery, sometimes with easy-to-detect** fruity smells, like apples and pears, and even people who usually say "Uh, smells, um, wine-y?" can tell there's something special going on here.
Usually, at the $10 price point, Gewurz is either generic white wine, or sweet. Now, most Gewurztraminer isn't actually sweet, even though that's the word most people would use. It doesn't have residual sugar (or doesn't often) the way Riesling and many other German wines can. Instead, it is what they call "off-dry" which is just snob for "tastes sweet." But cheap ones do seem to have that actual sugar in them.
Not so with this yummy wine from Oregon. It is certainly a simple wine compared to many Alsatian wines, but at half (or one quarter) the price, it does very well. It is much more balanced than typical cheap gewurzes, with very pleasant scents of, well, apples and flowers, and late summer when the trees are starting to bloom and...well, I did say I love it.
Gewurz is a good all around wine for food, too, because it's big enough to stand up to heavy foods (unlike many whites) and it does very well with spicy things like Thai cuisine.
rating: 5 points. $10.99. Excellent wine for the money, and would compare favorably to some costing a bit more.
**Not the pretentious gobbledygook many people say "Notes of Madagascar vanilla with just a soupcon of Indonesian Cinnamon" along with twenty other things, 19 of which were listed on the label. Most people can get three, with some practice, and others are usually the power of suggestion.
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