Lest We Forget Traminer
What on earth, you would surely ask, is an allegedly self-respecting wine critic doing by devoting an entire article to that most overlooked of supposedly noble white grapes, traminer? For traminer also known as gewurztraminer has surely made more forgettable wine than any other white grape in Australia, most of which is now sold diluted to the point of no recognition and is left saccharine-sweet to mask its finish.
Since it was supposed to be the next white wave after chardonnay, wine companies planted traminer like a weed: all over the Hunter, the Barossa, Mildura and Griffith, whose soils and climates have about as much in common with traminer’s Rhine valley homelands as Canadian tundra has to the Simpson desert. Little wonder they’re still planting chardonnay.
Most of us can remember a bad experience with traminer. Most of mine were a decade or more, in the days when raw enthusiasm held sway over the tasting judgement of an entire generation of rabid wine enthusiasts. If someone recommended a wine with enough timbre in their voice, try it and like it we did. Traminer never had it so good, before or since. But you can fool some of the people for just some of the time, and ultimately winemakers were left with a torrent of traminer that nobody, for sound reason, would ever want to drink.
Traminer is the sole argument I can muster that negates the doctrine that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the general public. At its worst, it is uncompromisingly tough and spicy, with a viscosity and pungency suggestive of a low-grade lubricant suited to heavy industry, before a finish decidedly more hard and medicinal than vinous.
Chemistry fiends may be intrigued that traminer is supposed to produce through natural means a molecule very similar to glycerol, to which wine critics ascribe the ‘hair oil’ character of mature traminer wines. You’d better believe it!
Bad traminer lacks any form of subtlety. Rather than gently feeling its way around and seducing the taste receptors of the mouth, it quickly delivers a haymaking k.o., rendering the palate useless for days afterwards. Traminer became synonymous with bad plonk. So then they blended it with riesling instead.
They are both German grapes, riesling and traminer; they’re both floral and perfumed, yet their original union in wine was little more than a marriage of sheer convenience. A few traminer-rieslings remain today, and since most of the poorest traminer vineyards have been uprooted or grafted to other more suitable grapes, these are generally sound and flavoursome wines. This New Year’s Eve, however, I found myself served with a sobering reminder that like a rambling and noxious weed that stubbornly refuses to be killed, bad traminer-riesling is anything but a bad memory of the past.
Now that in all likelihood you have sworn never to touch the stuff again, I move to the real point of it all. Traminer can be fabulous and, given the occasion, quite unsurpassable, just as aristocratic as traminer-riesling can be working class. As we are now coming to appreciate with pinot noir, it all has to do with where it comes from.
Speaking personally, I rate the traminers from Alsace in France, the Rheinpfalz in Germany, or even from the Eden Valley or the Yarra Valley in Australia on a par with semillons from the Hunter Valley, zinfandels from California, marsanne from the Rhone Valley or riesling from Clare. They deserve their place amongst the best of the world’s idiosyncratic wines, although most of us would happily ignore them. Leading English wine critic, Michael Broadbent says that traminer is the most disregarded of all the noble grapes.
The best Australian traminers present an abundance of fragrant, musky, spicy fruits, laced with lychees, passionfruit and tropical fruit salad. They are intensely flavoured, yet show the restraint and elegance that the lesser examples could never hope for.
The Alsatian traminers are more savoury and exotic. More robust than our local traminers, they need time for their inherent acidity to soften, by which time they acquire pungent scents of spice, leatherwood and honey. The best German traminers are very flowery, but can tend towards clumsiness and fatness.
I have little doubt that the two best traminers in Australia are those made by Lillydale Vineyards and Delatite, with Pipers Brook coming a close third. Each are cool-climate wines, from the Yarra Valley and Lillydale Vineyards is found in a particularly cool part of the Yarra, Mansfield and Pipers Brook in north-eastern Tasmania. Each is made with to emphasise the fruit’s complex and aromatic qualities; each is delicate and extraordinarily fragrant when young.
Unlike the majority of Australian traminers, these wines display an ability to age gracefully, without fear of the hardness and fatness and I mean this quite literally as a sensation on the palate that most acquire after time. The traminers of Lillydale, especially, rival the best of those from Alsace in their ongoing freshness, durability and elegance. Chatsfield Mount Barker, WA is progressing nicely as it refines a lineage of musky, herby traminers of genuine longevity.
Moorilla Estate from Hobart and Tolley Eden Valley also make outstanding traminers. Moorilla’s wine is exceedingly hard to find on the mainland, while the Tolley is available everywhere for a very accessible price.
Orlando uses a high-tech approach in the winery including terpene enhancement to maximise the intensity and lusciousness of its Flaxmans Traminer Eden Valley. This wine, another whose fine quality is very affordable, tends to peak at or just after its time of release, so I would beware of cellaring for too long. For sheer weight of traminer flavour, however, it is hard to beat.
No article about traminer would be complete without reference to the very oaky, viscous and pungent breed made by Idyll Vineyards Geelong, Victoria, for since its inception in 1983, this particular style has created a loyal following. I must say that I find it tends to exaggerate the rich, muscular tendencies of the grape at the expense of its inherent flavour, but its success in the market confirms that different people appreciate different things in wine.
Which is precisely the reason why you should take another look at a good traminer soon.
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