Half of humanity twists its tongue into a pretzel trying to say it. The other half just gives up and points.
Nora Thiel of Delheim Wine Estate has seen enough people suffer through this linguistic acid test to know it’s real. She swears online sales are rescuing the wine. “People can finally buy it without having to say it,” she laughs. Click, add to cart, avoid public humiliation. You don’t even have to pretend you know what those umlauts are for.
Delheim is one of the last South African holdouts still making the stuff, this fragrant, eccentric, often misunderstood white wine that smells like a florist shop crashed into a spice market. Only 70 hectares of it exist in the country, and almost half of that is in Stellenbosch. Not a big footprint. More like a cult.
Which suits Delheim just fine. If there was ever a Cape Estate that looked like it was carved out of the European subconscious, namely a mountain farm with old-world swagger and a soft spot for long lunches, it’s this one. Gewürztraminer belongs here the way eccentric uncles belong at family dinners: a little loud, unmistakable, but god, things would be dull without them.
The grape itself has a passport thicker than a retired airline pilot’s. Born near the Austrian border in Italy, named after the village of Tramin, it somehow became Gewürztraminer – “spiced Tramin” – because, presumably, someone decided “Tramin” alone was too boring for a wine that smells like litchi, roses and the kind of secret spice drawer your grandmother didn’t let you touch.
These days it’s most at home in Alsace, that French region with a German accent and the culinary borderland of choucroute, smoked pork and wines built to stand up to them.
South Africa’s affair with the grape started when Spatz Sperling – German-born, wry, stubborn in the way only men who know what good wine should taste like can be – planted it at Delheim in the 1960s. His buddy Frans Malan at Simonsig followed suit. One imagines the two of them sitting at battered wooden tables, tasting each other’s efforts, Spatz ribbing Frans: “Only a German can make real Gewürztraminer,” grinning like he’d just won a wager no one else knew had been placed.
Jancis Robinson, the kind of wine critic whose name carries the weight of a papal decree, calls Gewürztraminer one of the two most recognisable wine aromas on earth. (The other? Sauvignon Blanc.) She’s right. Delheim’s version hits you with litchi first, like a tropical fruit slapped across the nose, then comes the rose petals, the spice, the suggestion that somewhere, someone is cooking something worth leaving your job for.
Walk through the vineyards near harvest and you’ll notice the grapes themselves are pink-skinned. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’re destined for rosé. But the juice runs clear, a quiet magic trick the grape plays on anyone paying attention.
Delheim keeps the winemaking simple: stainless steel, cool fermentations, no fancy oak, just the raw, unfiltered personality of the grape bottled without apology. Besides the spice and tropical suntan on the nose, the wine is long, cool and refreshing, requiring for its drinking in greedy, thirsty draughts. It’s got lotsa flavours, and a flirtatious perky acidic edge akin to a French kiss from a chick who’s just immersed from a Wim Hof-inspired plunge, somewhere icy.
Spatz adored the stuff. To him, it tasted like home. I once saw him drinking a glass on a bleak, wet Stellenbosch winter afternoon while the rest of us were hunkered down with Cabernet Sauvignon. I asked why the hell he was drinking a cold white wine in weather better suited to whisky. He smiled – that wide, knowing, mischievous smile – and said, “Gewürztraminer will always bring a smile to your face. Any time. Any weather.” One of his Jack Russells dozed on his lap, clearly in agreement.
The guy fought for the wine, too. In the ’70s he even took a corporate behemoth to court for the right to use the traditional German bocksbeutel bottle. He lost, but then the world moved on anyways, leaving those dumpy bottles behind. Delheim’s sleek modern version won the aesthetic war without trying. There’s poetry in that kind of accidental revenge.
And food, don’t get any of the Sperlings started on food. Gewürztraminer is a culinary shapeshifter: it handles heat, spice, salt, earth. Pour it with a curry, a pile of wild porcinis after the rain, or that molten cheese fondue the Sperling family does come winter – the kind of meal that makes you question why humans ever stopped eating like medieval peasants. The wine just works. It’s joyful. Unpretentious. Honest.
In a world full of wines trying too hard to impress, Delheim’s Gewürztraminer sits there quietly, smelling like a bouquet left on your doorstep by someone who cares and tasting like the wine was made for reviving lost souls and allowing spirits to soar. All it asks is that you try saying its name without fear.
Or, you know, just order it online.
This article was originally published on Wine Goggle, Emile Joubert's blog.