Topic: TN: The Beyer necessities (Alsace, pt. 2, long, img)
Author: Thor Iverson (Boston, MA)
Date: 20040114120852

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Paris

The cheese that keeps on giving The lapin not-so-agile

Alsace

Monsieur is a great connoisseur

The birds and the bees

There's only one thing to do the day after a long, tiring journey: nothing.

Thus it is that we lack the energy to get in our car and drive anywhere on this beautiful, sunny spring morning in Alsace. Instead, we take a lazy stroll around the tiny grey and brown village of Hunawihr, in search of something to eat.

Near the center of town, there's a restaurant - not open for lunch, at least today - and a small "convenience" store (doing triple duty as a post office, fax center, and announcements board) staffed by a very large, rather redolent woman who frowns at us through a hairy pair of wrinkled lips. We pick up some Lisbeth pétillant, a little cured ham, and some Munster, taking them back to our gîte for a picnic lunch in its garden.

Bees swirl around us, though not coming any closer than the nearest lilac frond. There's a distant birdsong somewhere in the tree-covered folds of the Vosges. A rooster lets loose a few experimental lunchtime calls. It's warm, quiet except for the sounds of nature, and incredibly relaxing.

He put his hand in the Métro door!

With lunch, we open a half-bottle of wine gifted us by the proprietor of our gîte: the Léon Beyer 1993 Pinot Gris "Réserve" (Alsace). It's fading away, really as much a suggestion of pinot gris as an actual representation of the variety; faintly spiced pear skin and leaves linger on a long, very dry finish with a touch of desiccated tannin. And it's easily overwhelmed by the Munster.

Meating place

Any drive along the route des vins is going to be beautiful (well, maybe not one that goes through Epfig), and the rolling cross-vineyard route from Hunawihr to Eguisheim is no exception. We park and navigate the concentric rings that make up the fortification-derived structure of the village, wandering their arms'-width curvature and admiring the always-lively Alsatian architecture that describes them. As in Hunawihr, all is still and quiet.

Along the way, we find a merchant (who commands little more than a window and a small folding sign) selling a variety of wild game saucisson. I'm a sucker for cured meat of any kind, and we load up with several bags of the stuff - male and female deer, ostrich, wild boar, etc. - only a little of which lasts through the week, thanks to my constant snacking. The sun is high and a bit hot, but the town is practically abandoned; it's a welcome change from the crowds that can often pour through the narrow streets.

Somewhat behind and to the side of the beautifully fortified little chapel that anchors the village center, we take rest at a café (the name is unreadable in my notes: "Gilbert"-something) for a large, quenching bottle of Carola pétillant, weak coffee, and a bowl of refreshing mirabelle ice cream, before crossing the church's fountained courtyard to taste some wine.

Take eight Beyer, call me in the morning

The Château d’Eguisheim

For an establishment right on the main square of Eguisheim, the public tasting room at Léon Beyer doesn't sport much elbow room. We arrive alone, but though only one other couple eventually joins us for tasting, things are cramped. And slow: given the relatively small number of wines available, we spend a very long time here.

Part of it is the inevitable result of a net positive: the woman working the tasting desk is friendly and chatty (the latter in three languages, with little apparent effort in the switching), and spends a lot more time conversing than she does pouring. We soon abandon plans to see if Bruno Sorg is open for drop-in visitors, and concentrate on the wines before us.

Beyer is one of the last icons in the school that maintains Alsatian wine should be dry, and while it's a noble and historically valid pursuit (if one subdivides history in a certain way), it's not at all clear that it is to the domaine's benefit. The winery has gone through very uneven patches of late, and while I still remember an early-seventies Beyer at Auberge de l'Ill as one of the most sublime riesling epiphanies of my life, little since has lived up to that potential. The wines are designed to age, and thus can be difficult in their youth, but the difficulties extend to issues of ripeness and balance, without which there will never be the sort of proper aging the Beyer family seeks.

Missing, too, are grand cru designations, which Beyer eschews for the usual reasons: lack of qualitative rigor and abandonment of historical precedent. Instead, Beyer's labels are deliberate throwbacks to a bygone age, which add charm and insulate the domaine against the modernity and point-chasing that damages many of their peers' efforts, but don't quite make up for certain deficiencies in the wines.

Grin and Beyer it

Léon Beyer 2001 Muscat (Alsace) - Light, leafy, spice rack aromas that turn more classically floral on the palate, with a dry and slightly sour tint to the finish. It's a friendly little quaffer, but that acidity craves food.

Léon Beyer 2000 Riesling "Les Ecaillers" (Alsace) - Carries one gram of residual sugar, which is about all Beyer will allow in their non-late harvest rieslings. This wine is completely given over to lemon-soaked iron and lemon curd; light at first, and seemingly innocuous, it builds to a long, intense finish. It will improve with age, which it very much requires. Very sparse for a 2000 riesling, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Léon Beyer 1998 Riesling "Cuvée des Comtes d'Eguisheim" (Alsace) - Very ripe, showing mixed peels of lemon, orange, and grapefruit and then closing around a whirlpool of iron filings. Very structured and long, with strongly malic/Granny Smith apple notes providing a firm, drying finish. There's even more aging potential here, but then there's more stuffing as well.

The Ecaillers and the Comtes d'Eguisheim are grapes from the same terroir but with different destinies; the Ecaillers is vinified dry (strictly so, to the extent possible), while the Comtes d'Eguisheim is late-harvested at a point of sur-maturité, in search of maximum concentration with just a hint of botrytis. The wine is then vinified as close to dryness as is reasonable; that the '98 shows no obvious sweetness is more due to acidity than to a lack of residual sugar, though almost all tasters will indeed interpret it as dry.

Léon Beyer 2000 Muscat "Réserve" (Alsace) - More perfumed than the 2001 normale, zingy and slightly tannic. The finish is big, but short, which suggests that this wine is best consumed early in its life. In that youth, however, it's a uniquely structured muscat, with varietal character and heft.

Léon Beyer 2000 Pinot Gris "Cuvée des Comtes d'Eguisheim" (Alsace) - There's a light sheen of creamy pear, but this is a structure-dominated wine, showing steely minerality and acidity throughout the palate and a sternly Teutonic finish of some length. Whole mushrooms, with their earth-sweaty organic funk, emerge with intense swirling. Of all the wines thus far, this is the one with the most eventual upside, though one will have to be quite patient, and the wine will always be very acidic.

Vineyard crossing (Mambourg to the left, Marckrain to the right)

Léon Beyer 1998 Gewurztraminer "Cuvée des Comtes d'Eguisheim" (Alsace) - Reductive and a little stale at first, eventually developing some zip at the edges but remaining fundamentally hollow. Dried peach emerges on a moderately short finish. This wine is probably closed, but I'm not sure the grand re-opening is going to be all that exciting.

Léon Beyer 1997 Gewurztraminer "Cuvée des Comtes d'Eguisheim" (Alsace) - From grapes greatly in excess of their normal ripeness, as is common with '97s from Alsace, and with much lower acidity than Beyer - and, really, most winemakers of the region - would prefer…as is also common with '97s. A little bottle stink blows off with swirling, showing intense, zingy spice aromas; something about the phenolics (probably coupled with the alcohol) actually almost burns my nasal passages. It's disconcerting, to say the least. Great acidity carries this wine farther into its finish than the previous wine, but there's still an oddly abrupt end to it. I'm not convinced by either of these gewurztraminers.

Léon Beyer 1989 Gewurztraminer "Sélection des Grains Nobles" (Alsace) - Fully mature, though in no danger of falling apart either, showing ripe peach, pear, and cashew spiked with freshly-harvested corn, hazelnut, and lychee. A terrific wine with moderate sweetness and balanced botrytis. (Unfortunately, a bottle presented at an offline later in the week is completely shot, so beware of variation.)

All in all, this is a decidedly mixed group of wines; some quite drinkable, some less so. This has, for some time now, seemed to be a domaine in search of a product up to the excellence of its philosophy. I hope they find it, because history suggests that there is much raw material of quality that could be put to better use.

Vineyard sunset (Hunawihr in the background)

New veau

Purchases in hand, we wander around the town center a little longer, touring the church and sitting for a while beside its fountain. It's yet another French holiday, and so there are no actual food stores open anywhere nearby, but a boucherie on Eguisheim's main square is open; Theresa acquires the ingredients for a vegetable-free dinner while I retrieve the car.

Back at the gîte she relaxes in our garden, now shady and cool in the low-angled late afternoon sun, while I drive the vineyard roads and give the digital camera a vineyard workout. By the time I return, she's already in the kitchen, boiling and then butter-frying spaetzle alongside a few juicy morsels of veal. With the food, we crack open one of the day's purchases.

Léon Beyer 2000 Muscat "Réserve" (Alsace) - Seemingly always building to something, like a series of short crescendos, with floral minerality and spice crisped up with a vague lime character, then showing orange and grapefruit, then back to flowers and fine-grained minerals again. A lovely wine, and food brings out fruit characters that were missing in our tasting sample.

After dinner, Theresa reads while I settle in front of the television. There's something uniquely entertaining about other cultures' TV programs, even when I can't always follow them, but tonight there's absolutely nothing unique about one in particular. On the first available channel, it's "The Osbournes": subtitled, rather than dubbed, with all the editing bleeps of the U.S. version removed.

And that, I guess, is unique entertainment of a different kind.

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