Seeing red.
We have been making Navarro’s
Estate Bottled Gewürztraminer for almost three decades and like us, it has changed. Our benchmark wine, like our humor, is drier than it used to be. We try to make wines that reflect transformations in our personal taste and do our darn best to ignore marketing gurus who attempt to outguess the market. While Alsatian Gewürztraminers seem to be becoming richer and sweeter, our Gewürz has evolved in the opposite direction. Over the last decade Navarro’s
Estate Bottled Gewürztraminer has been inching drier and 2001 is the driest yet. The challenge has been to make the wine drier without abandoning the generous, round flavors of this jolly variety. The simple solution is to emphasize the fruit, but the practical achievement is complex. First of all, Navarro cluster selects fully ripe fruit after the berries turn russet-red. Our newest fields use rootstocks & clonal selections that were carefully picked to accentuate depth of flavor. Last but not least, we ferment and age this wine exclusively in temperature controlled oak casks.
French ampelographies refer to Gewürztraminer as Gewürztraminer rosé because of the deep red color when the grapes are fully mature. There is a direct correlation between skin color and terpenes, the floral aromatic compounds that are Gewürztraminer’s signature. Ted checks that only red grapes go into our favorite white wine.
The 2001 harvest stuttered due to schizophrenic weather and ripening was uneven with some grapes being fully ripe while adjacent clusters were still green. 
We resorted to costly cluster-selecting red fruit, returning to each vineyard several times.
The old-world oak is perfect for a complex, dry finish but the new-world refrigeration insures that Gewürztraminer’s heady aromatics won’t be squelched. The wine is rich with peach, litchi and roses but the bright, lively citrus and the crisp, dry finish keep the exotic aromas in proportion.
Best of Class and Gold Medal winner.
Now available in a 1.5 Liter Magnum!
Naama, 
an enology student from Israel, adjusts the cooling panel in an oak oval where we age our Gewürztraminer. This attention to detail may be why wine writer Matt Kramer wrote in February "Navarro makes one of America’s consistently great Gewürztraminers."
