Please enjoy a blog post by team member Ksenia who had an epic wine and food experience last week which was worth reporting on. 

Today we’re taking a little wine tour down to the village of Beblenheim situated at 215m high in the Alsace region. The vineyards of Beblenheim are world-renowned for their great wines: pinot gris, muscat, riesling and gewurztraminer. The sunny hillside of the Sonnenglanz (in Alsatian dialect: the bright sunshine) makes a Grand Cru (of the same name).

Hidden away is the Domaine Bott-Geyl – a traditional producer that’s been around for over 300 years but today takes a modern approach to its winemaking. Jean-Christophe bott took control of the estate in 1993 , he then converted it to biodynamics in 2002. They tend 15 hectares around southern Alsace.

The Elements series is about creating elegant wines to pair with food. In recent years they have started to be more approachable for the consumer and were one of the few vineyards to introduce sweetness scales on the bottle labels, which, to this day are still controversial in the region, as it regularly tilts towards drier styles in wine. The producer’s whole ideology is to bring together tradition and modernity. 

Butler’s are very lucky to hold the domaine’s exclusive range (they import them to the UK with their friends) and I would like to introduce the reader to Domaine Bott-Geyl’s own - Gewurztraminer Grand Cru Sonnenglanz 2011.

Gewürztraminer is made from a variety of pink grapes, native of the Alsace region, with cold climates and clay soils.

This cuvée comes from a south-east facing Grand Cru plot and is at once intense, complex and deep golden in colour. It is very gentle on the nose, with perfumed honeysuckle notes and unusual but distinctive, new tennis balls.

The palate follows this with a perfumed, opulent medium-sweetness that is reminiscent of grapefruit, banana, dried peach and candied fruit pastilles: there are pineapple and plum and unbridled richness, which bounds with marked acidity and a slight phenolic grip.

Last week I enjoyed a few glasses of this superb wine at a Thai restaurant  (Erawan, Lewes) and matched it with the beautiful, authentic curry. The creaminess of coconut milk, the heat of chilis, and the fragrance of spices in Thai cuisine made it a match in heaven and one of my favourite Gewürztraminer pairings in the off-dry style.

In particular, a sweet-yet-spicy mixed seafood, red curry paired deliciously and expressed the grape variety in its perfect form. The fattiness and creaminess of the shell fish cut through the prominent acidity and the sweetness of pineapple in the sauce balanced in harmony with the honeyed notes of the wine.

An absolute stunner of a wine!