1998 Domaine WeinbachTokay Pinot Gris Clos des Capucins Cuvee Laurence -- an incredibly pleasing wine, right from the get-go: beautiful lightly burnished brass colour, big nose of pear, apricot, and honey; creamy, thick texture, just wallows around in your mouth for a while, lots of pear, peachy/apricoty flavors with some smokiness, and an unusual hint of sweet mint (almost exactly like Wrigley's Doublemint gum, if you know that expression of mint) right on the tip of the tongue; long, luxurious fruity finish with enough acidity to call it lip-smacking. It's honestly hard to not just guzzle this wine; I had to force myself to drink it slowly and enjoy it longer. Enough power to go for quite a few more years, though it would hard to wait if I had a lot of these. I guess about 93-4 pts. today.

Whenever I have one of the really good Alsatian wines, I wonder again about why they aren't far more popular. I have one more bottle of this one that I'll save for a couple of years.

It was a nice match with a carrot-ginger soup that had a few sauteed tiger prawns thrown into it.

Alsatians are popular with those with discriminating tastes. Weinbach wines are high on my list. Unfortunately I dropped and broke one yesterday in my offsite locker. At least it smelled good in there for awhile.

Ouch!

Your comment reminded me that one of the few good things about our local liquor monopoly used to be that if you broke a bottle, as long as you brought in the top of the neck with cork or cap still intact, they would replace it. It cost them nothing because they would send all breakage-- whether it occurred in a store or after purchase-- back to the distributors for reimbursement. I don't know whether that's still the policy, but maybe this weekend I'll break a bottle just to find out.