Hugel’s Gewürztraminer Selection de Grains Nobles 2007

A wine so rich and intense it is nothing but unalloyed, honeyed decadence in a glass. A vendange tardive picked, not by individual clusters as is the normal practice with botrytis wines, but by individual grapes, hence the name, literally a selection of noble berries, and the astounding focused intensity of its flavor.

So powerfully concentrated is it that it made Hugel’s regular VT, an otherwise superb wine, taste thin and demi-sec by comparison.

I luxuriated in this golden ambrosia at the congenial Le Sarment D’Or in Requwihr, Alsace’s most picture-postcard-perfect medieval town. It is, of course, just a baby – the wine, not the town, that’s 500 years old in its current incarnation – as these wines can last decades, and tasting it earlier it had come across as merely intensely sweet. But two hours later and perfectly paired with a nougat glacé, the sweetness had developed a nuanced, fruit-tinged complexity – passion fruit and mangoes, perhaps – that, along with the bright citrus acidity, resulted in a multi-hued wine-and-food pairing made in Heaven.

This was nothing short of viniferous bliss, a state of ecstasy bought about by savoring one of the world’s truly great wines.