Opened a 50 cl. bottle of Albert Boxler ’03 Grand Cru Gewurztraminer New Year’s Eve. The bottle was the last of our booty from a trip to Alsace last year and has a story behind it.
Mrs. Boxler had been in charge of the winery on the day we visited. She was towing her baby son Zachary around on her hip the whole time we were there and was pleased to hear that there had been an American President by the name of Zachary. When it came time for us to purchase a few bottles, little Zachary began to act up so an older son was summoned to help out. What we wanted turned out to be way up on top of a mountain of bottles. The boy couldn’t manage the ladder, so before I could offer to help he just scampered up the stack of bottles and got them! How he didn’t create a catastrophe we couldn’t figure out, but both he and his mother were so calm about it all that it must have been standard procedure.
The first sip of the Gewurz the other night brought us back to the present in a hurry. Much too sweet! The label had nothing about RS or acidity so I got out my handy Clinitest kit and found the sugar to be about 5.5%. That was sweet enough to mask much of the taste. We put the cork back in and left it.
The next night we had the last of our Christmas cookies for dessert and decided to try the Gewurz again. The taste was much improved for all the cookies. With Lebkuchen and Springerle it was quite good, but with the Gingerbread Men it was absolutely superb. Just a few iterations of piece of Gingerbread Man - sip of wine and the remains of the original 50cl were soon gone.
Ginger and Gewurz are both spicy, no doubt accounting at least in part for the reason they might go well together. We had received two wine and food books for Christmas (thank you forumites for your recommendations) so I looked to see what they said. Sure enough, both suggest recipes containing ginger as going well with Gewurz. Three recipes in Aspler & Sloan’s Gewurz section contain ginger. For Goldstein it is fully 3 of 4, capped off with a Spicy Gingered-Carrot Soup.