Alsace Drink
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.
Top
Alsace beer
The
Alsace area produces half the beer drunk in France so you cannot undertake an Alsace bike tour without "un demi pression". This tends to be
Kronenbourg or Heineken. However there are certain smaller breweries
in the area, some of which can be visited. We have found these for you:
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