Alsace Update
This year, for a number of reasons, I decided to taste Alsace wines chez moi instead of in Alsace. This approach, as it turned out, brought some advantages and some disadvantages. In the minus column, a few sets of wines from some of my favorite estates did not make it in time to be included in this article, in most cases due to shipping issues. I plan to insert the wines from most of these important producers into this article later this fall through the miracle of electronic publishing, so watch this space.
A major plus offered by tasting at home, though, was that I was able to spend more time with the wines I sampled, following many of them for 48 to 72 hours in the recorked bottles. This is rarely possible on tasting trips abroad. Being able to track the behavior of these wines with extended aeration was especially helpful in the case of the 2008s, which tend to be highly complex and firmly structured wines that need time to express themselves.
Another advantage to having producers select the wines they wanted to show me was that they had greater impetus to send bottlings that are in the market now or that will be released within the next six months. So you will not see notes on hundreds of wines that will not arrive in the U.S. for another year or three. Many Alsace estates do not release their grand cru bottlings or late harvest wines until two to four years after the vintage, and sometimes even later, so they probably would not have been thrilled to show me their 2009s had I shown up on their doorstep this September. (In many cellars, the 2009s had not yet been bottled before the 2010 harvest began.) Most growers concentrated on sending me sets of their 2008s, with several of them sending some early-release 2009s and a few giving me a more in-depth look at the new vintage.
If you see a somewhat smaller number of grand crus in this year’s coverage, that largely reflects the current state of the market. Although it is clear that many U.S. importers are working on very reasonable mark-ups these days in the hope of selling their Alsace wines, many of these wines are still quite expensive, and the market for grand crus and scarce late-harvest wines is very limited in this country. I should also point out that the current vintage in the marketplace for many grand crus is still 2007, so please refer to Issue 141 for tasting notes on those wines.