In a vintage One Bottle column first published in WFW32 in 2011, Andrew Jefford succumbs to the sensuality of Zind-Humbrecht 2008 Gewurztraminer Herrenweg de Turckheim Vieilles Vignes.
I seldom feel like Lord Alfred Douglas. This is perhaps just as well, given that the most celebrated of Oscar Wilde’s lovers had a life rendered miserable by self-indulgence, given that he was long estranged from a vengeful and violent father, given that he was an anti-Semite who squandered much of his inheritance in libel actions (both as plaintiff and defendant), and given that the mental illness that ran in his family—one prone to a disproportionate number of “shooting accidents”—was eventually to claim his only son. He was, though, also a poet, and his 1894 poem “Two Loves,” which played a crucial part in earning Wilde his “gross indecency” conviction and two years’ hard labor in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading jails, concludes with the celebrated line, “‘I am the love that dare not speak its name.’”
This is when those of us who love Gewurztraminer begin to empathize with Bosie. In right-thinking wine drinking circles, there is something a little shameful about admitting that you regularly spend an evening with this lilac-berried mutant and even enjoy the experience. The “first love,” the sort that fills “‘The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame,’” would of course be a passion for respectable Riesling—upright, straight as a poplar, its pencil stiffened with acidity, and usually properly dry or properly sweet without too much hanky-panky in the middle. Riesling and rectitude are bedfellows (in wedlock, of course). Whereas Gewurztraminer is doubtful, languid, and fin de siècle—at best a Rosenkavalier and at worst a Salome, with its head-slicing alcohol levels, its neglect of
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
