Alsace Drink

• Wine
• Beer

Alsace wine

Alsace is a noted wine area and so there will be Alsace wines, which you may have tasted on the Alsace wine route, on the wine list  during your Alsace holiday along with a few “foreign” wines such as Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne.  The Alsace wine area is one of the few French wine areas which normally has the grape variety on the bottle. You are likely to see the following varieties and styles:

Variety (mainly white)

• Pinot Blanc makes a good clean wine.
• Pinot Gris tastes of gentle peach or apricot, has good acids like Riesling and a hint of Gewürztraminer.  This is the speciality of the region.
• Gewürztraminer is spicy in flavour and aroma.
• Riesling - when young this can be neutral or slightly floral but it becomes complex and steely with age.
• Pinot Noir is the only red wine produced in the area and is probably not worth the price you will have to pay for it.
• Muscat is normally dry with a grapey flavour and nose.
• Sylvaner is best when young and is slightly perfumed (this is unlikely to be the best wine available).

Style

• Alsace AC is the local wine and it ranges from dry to medium.
• Edelzwicker can, in the worst case, be a mixture of white wines that the maker has left over. But it can be good value if it comes from a good producer who has focused on the blending and the quality of grapes used.
• Crémant d'Alsace is a Champagne style wine made out of Pinot Blanc or Pinot Noir grapes.
• Vendange Tardive is a late harvest, rich, sweet wine.
• Sélection des Grains Nobles is a super sweet, complex wine which will contain juice from grapes which have shrivelled up on the vine to have high levels of sugar and flavour.
• Grand Cru is excellent, highly concentrated wine from a defined small wine area (often walled off and perfectly positioned for great grape growth). The very best of dry or medium wines.

We would recommend that you drink plenty of water at lunch on your bike holiday in hot weather as you need to replenish your body’s fluids.  However, that does not mean you should not add wine to the water and a jug of the local wine certainly helps the water go down.

Alsace beer