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Sue and I were fortunate to attend a big dinner at Cantina Tramin‘s strikingly beautiful winery a few years ago. Although I can’t really remember what we ate or who we sat with, I know for sure which wine we most enjoyed: Gewürztraminer!
The town of Tramin, in Italy’s Alto Adige region, is thought by many to be the birthplace of the Gewürztraminer grape variety, which is Cantina Tramin’s most-planted grape. The Nussbaumer Gewürztraminer is their signature wine and the wine we returned to again and again at dinner that night.
Cooperative Economics
We’ve written about Cantina Tramin before because it makes such a good wine economics story. Cantina Tramin is a cooperative winery and, like every cooperative I know of, it started life as a defensive effort. Faced with a soft market and low grape prices, growers banded together to make and to sell their own wines and share in the profits (if any). The initial focus was on bulk wine production, but about 50 years ago the bold decision was made to shift from quantity to quality, building a strong brand and earning higher margins. There was no guarantee that this would work and some other cooperatives that have tried it have not succeeded.
Cantina Tramin today is a noteworthy success story. Its 160 grower families farm about 280 hectares of grapes, producing 150,000 cases of wine. If you do the math you will quickly realize that the individual vineyards are tiny, so cooperation mobilizes strength in numbers. The small scale of individual holdings is exploited to highlight terroir. Higher quality grapes are rewarded with higher prices. Although it produces both red and white wines, Cantina Tramin is best known for its white wines, especially Gewürztraminer, for which it is famous in Italy.
The White Shift in Action
As most Wine Economist readers know, wine consumers today seem to be shifting from red wines to white wines, much to the benefit of Alto Adige producers and those in other regions of the Italian northeast such as Friuli and the Veneto. The white shift is especially important to the degree that it compensates somewhat for the general decline in wine consumption. White wines have a larger share of the smaller market pie, so to speak. Smaller share, smaller pie for red wine producers overall.
Gewürztraminer is well-known in Italy and nearby Austria, for example, and the Nussbaumer Gewürztraminer has a stellar reputation. But Gewürztraminer seems to be a hard sell here in the U.S., even though excellent Gewürztraminer wines are made here (think Anderson Valley, for example). The story is told that the famous Napa winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff endorsed Washington State’s potential as a quality wine producer upon tasting a glass of excellent local Gewürztraminer.
Gewürztraminer & the Riesling Curse
Gewürztraminer has the qualities that wine drinkers today look for. It is crisp, aromatic, delicious. It might not be the next “boom variety,” but it should be more popular than it is, don’t you think? What’s the problem?
I hate to put it this way, but maybe Gewürztraminer has the Riesling Curse. Like Riesling, Gewürztraminer has a name that some people are afraid of getting wrong (Jancis Robinson has written that some people are uncertain if it is Rice-ling or Rees-ling or something else). Gewürztraminer is kind of a long word (see Mark Twain’s essay “The Awful German Language” in this regard) and cautious people are sometimes afraid to try to sound it out, I guess.
A second problem is that, again like Riesling, Gewürztraminer can be made in different styles and consumers may be afraid to make a mistake. Is it sweet or is it dry? How can I tell? Gewürztraminer can even fool you a bit because a sweet aroma can disguise a dry finish. Gewürztraminer is what is sometimes called an “experience good.” You won’t know if you like it until you try it. But it can be hard to get to that first sip.
Maybe Catina Tramin’s stellar line-up of Alto Adige white wines can be an onramp for Gewürztraminer. All the wines we’ve tried have been great. A glass of the Troy Chardonnay might lead to a bottle of the Stoan white blend, which includes a touch of Gewürztraminer along with Chardonnay and other grape varieties. Then, maybe, who knows? Gewürztraminer isn’t that hard to say once you’ve tasted it!