2005 Gewurztraminer Selection de Grains Nobles

In its very early days, Hugel’s 2005 Gewurztraminer Selection de Grains Nobles is already truly noble! Orange marmalade, caramelized peach, spiced pear and yellow plum preserves, cinnamon and mint candies, roses, and honey and white raisin fill the nose. Spectacularly luscious and expansive on the palate, honeyed, silken-textured, and loaded with primary, vividly juicy fruit such as one seldom encounters in this grape variety much less at stratospheric ripeness, this fills ones head with sweet perfume and dreams of future vinous glory – if only you can give it at least twenty years. And if one must drink it today, despite considerable sweetness, this amazing Gewurztraminer already displays not just prodigious length and profundity of flavor – saline chalky mineral suggestions and deep smoked meat pungency lending a darker side to its performance – but elegance, poise, refinement, and remarkable lift and refreshment. The Hugels – like the Beyers and Trimbachs – are true to tradition in their emphasis on dry-tasting wines across the varietal spectrum and in the release of their best wines only after a year or (usually) more of bottle age. As with Muscat, there is no “regular” bottling of Pinot Gris at Hugel, but rather one begins with a wine of primarily estate origins. In 1999 and 2003, Hugel elected to separately bottle the fruit of their oldest Pinot Noir vines (planted in 1966 in a parcel in the Pflostig known as “Les Neveux”). Importer: Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York, NY; tel. (212) 355-0700.