Wines made from Sylvaner grapes of Nahe
Discover the best wines made with Sylvaner as a single variety or as a blend of Nahe.
The sylvaner is grown mainly in Germany and Alsace. The buds are somewhat cottony and the young leaves are green. The same applies to the ribbed branches. Once mature, the dominant colour is golden-green and small elliptical berries with small to medium-sized bunches can be seen. The ripe fruit is then adorned by five-lobed leaves. This variety is susceptible to chlorosis, gray mold, powdery mildew and mildew. It is also sensitive to frost and wind because of its long branches. It can be grown in any kind of soil, although it prefers stony, sandy and light soils. It is indeed moderately acidic and offers a complex set of aromas such as bitter almond, fruity and floral background. The taste has an excellent mixture of honey and candied or dried fruits.
Nahe is one of the smaller German wine regions, named after the Nahe river which joins the Rhein at Rheinhessen/bingen">Bingen. The viticultural carea here is characterised by dramatic topography with steep slopes and craggy outcrops of metamorphic rock. Like most of the regions on or near the Rhine, its most prestigious wines are made from Riesling. There are around 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of Vineyards, spread across seven Grosslagen (wine districts) and over 300 Einzellagen (individual vineyard sites).
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
Starting with the 2021 vintage, non-late harvest Alsace Riesling must be ‘dry’, as defined by EU regulations, according to a proposed decree agreed by a two-thirds majority of the Alsace Winegrowers’ Association (AVA). Winemakers backed the plan at a vote in Colmar last week, although it requires approval from France’s appellation body, INAO. The move comes in addition to the introduction of a standardised way of communicating sweetness levels on Alsace AOC still wines. As per EU rul ...
The spirit was filled into a single ex-Sherry cask at the Speyside distillery in 1940, shortly before The Second World War forced The Macallan to close for the first time in its history. Bottled at 41.6% abv, only 288 decanters are available worldwide, featuring eye-catching packaging: a mouth-blown glass decanter sitting on a bronze sculpture of three hands, created by Scottish artist Saskia Robinson. The hands represent the distillery workers of 1940 who made the whisky; former Macallan chairm ...