Anxious to get these curiously tall bottles out of our refrigerator, we dove into the second wine, the sylvaner. While a fairly common grape grown in Alsace, its not considered a “noble” grape and thus, according to the notes on K&L’s website, the wines cannot be designated “Grand Cru”. They say that’s too bad, because this wine, from Boeckel, is made from grapes gown in the pre-eminent sylvaner vineyard in Alsace- Zotzenberg. I’m quite confused, however, because according to wikipedia that all changed in 2006 when sylvaner from Zotzenberg, and that vineyard only, was granted the right to make Grand Cru wines. I’m unclear on what all that means- if I’m understanding wikipedia, it might be because it's pure sylvaner and not a blend. But, the label doesn’t say Zotzenberg either. Or maybe not enough of the grapes are from Zotzenberg for it to qualify. Regardless of what’s going on, I purchased it for $15.99 and we drank the whole bottle.

Until my recent wine reading marathon, I’d never heard of the grape sylvaner, let alone tried it, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. After the riesling we were pretty excited about Alsace wines. In the glass it had more color than the riesling, more of a straw yellow. The nose was pretty one-dimensional to me: tropical fruit, mostly melon. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I spent a good long while staring at my aroma wheel and sniffing this wine and couldn’t get more than melon out of it.

It tasted of tropical fruit too, which I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting a lot of the acidity, and thus citrus fruits, that I found in the riesling. Specifically, I thought it tasted like bananas, though the wine wasn’t actually sweet tasting. I actually thought it wasn’t very acidic at all, and it had a general woodiness to it, though not as if it had been aged in oak. It reminded me vaguely of a wine Myles drank while I was pregnant (and thus I only got to smell and spit), the 2008 Merryvale Sauvignon Blanc, which I thought both smelled of and tasted like bananas. (Which was also a bit odd for a sauvignon blanc, because I’m much more used to the acidic, citrus style of Marlborough). The other thing I noted for the sylvaner was the long finish.

K&L had far fewer things to say about how this wine actually tasted. Deep and spicy was their description. I can concede to the deep part, but I didn’t get the spicy at all. This either means I’m lousy at wine tasting or we just had a different take. The Boeckel website wasn’t much help either- all en français. All in all it was good, though not great.

The score: ★★★