More Alsace for Alberta! BY MIKE ROBERTS
H
ere in the wild rose province, we love our red wines. It makes sense with our long winters, short summers and blink-or-you’ll-miss-it spring and fall. We find comfort and warmth in hearty dishes, certainly not shying away from red meat consumption. Red wines fit the bill—they are hearty, texturally diverse experiences that comfort our bellies, stain our teeth, and warm our chests. It is no wonder then that Alsace—with about 95 percent of wine production being white—rarely graces our tables. In northeastern France, alongside the Rhine River near Germany, Alsace is on the leeward side of the Vosges Mountains — a rain shadow casting its spell of dryness, sunshine and warmth in what would otherwise be an impossible climate for grape cultivation. Alsace has a long and storied history in which its control has been passed between Germany and France at least five times, whilst entrenched in war for nearly 200 years. The result is a fusion of cuisine, architecture, culture, language, and most notably a uniquely developed sense of place and style in its wines. Grapes were first planted in Alsace by
24 Culinaire | April 2020
the Romans in the 2nd Century AD, and it was considered (next to Bordeaux) to have some of the world’s finest wines in the Middle Ages. Here you will find the world’s oldest wine in a barrel from 1472, and there are more than 800 wine cellars with open doors to visitors, many within the town walls available to pedestrian traffic. If you have a trip to French wine country on your mind, Alsace is a must.
There is so much sunshine in the glass you may be convinced you’ve received your dose of Vitamin D. So how is it, with its unique history and long-standing winemaking traditions, that it could be a hidden gem and unknown to many Albertans? I often see people walk by an admittedly conspicuous Alsace wine section without batting an eye. The tall, slender “flute” shaped bottles, the mishmash of German-French language, fonts, and “feel” of the labels attached to Germanic grape varieties such as gewürztraminer and riesling, make it hard for many to assume anything other than the wine is sweet.
The truth could not be further away. Alsace wines are by and large dry, expressive wines offering freshness, bang for your buck, and even long-term cellaring options for the vino infatuate but there are also plenty of off-dry, gateway wines available for neophytes or broader gatherings. Wine producers and the Vins D’Alsace consortium (CIVA) are working together to end a decades-long struggle to create simplified, consumer-friendly labelling to help us choose our wines. The best solution seems to be the legal requirement to incorporate a sweetness scale infographic on the back label of all wines. The trick here though is for innumerable (and often traditionally minded) producers to agree on a standardized scale, and when to implement it. In the meantime, Alsace should be gracing the tables of Albertans, brightening up the gloomy winter days alongside hearty, salty dishes. There is so much sunshine in the glass you may be convinced you’ve received your dose of Vitamin D. The wines are pitch perfect for Easter, the bloom of spring, and slurping at summer gatherings. The versatility is astounding.
