First of all – let’s get the umlaut question out of the way. The word Gewürztraminer is actually a German one meaning ‘spice traminer’ or ‘perfume traminer’. Because it’s a German word, there is an umlaut on the ‘u’ but actually, most Gewürztraminer comes from France where the umlaut isn’t used. In SA, we go for the classical route name-wise, using the two little dots, but our wines cover quite a range, which is somewhat surprising considering that very little is actually grown here. A lot of people get put off this wine because of the name (Ge-verts-tram-eener) but once you’ve broken it down into syllables, you’ll be nonchalantly shortening it to Gewürtz like everyone else!