I like gewürztraminers.

Beyond the fact that I think that a good gewürztraminer is as good as a white wine can get, there’s something about them that seems to work well with the holiday season – sort of spicy, sort of fruity. When everything works, a rather complex set of multiple elements can come together without actually seeming complex, and all of that with the basic crispness of a white. Somehow that seems appropriate for Christmas, though – a holiday that should be deep but, quite often, is shallow (and generally has all the basic crispness of a family argument).

Or something like that.

This year I did try to be a touch more ambitious than I was last year, actually going so far as to spend all of $10. For my ambition, I was rewarded with a 2007 Vertikal Gewürztraminer – a German wine with a screw top. Neither of those really are things that give one confidence.

My initial impressions were about what one would expect from a $10 bottle of wine: not good, but not bad. The smell is especially nonexistent – really, it would be tough to distinguish a glass of this wine from a glass of water when blindfolded. Taste, luckily, was a touch more memorable. The normal citrus fruits one would expect from a white are there (and are certainly in abundance) with pear especially noticed. Almost no spicy elements, though, make it through – vague hints exist, but nothing well controlled or well-proportioned to match the expansive fruit tastes. The combination of these two

The problem, then, is not a lack any particular element, but the fact that the Vertikal never manages to become the sum of its parts, let alone more than that. That said, it is not bad by any means – and, at $10, I would even go so far as to call it a good value.

Score: 88