Arinto - Bucelas, Portugal

Sorting out the different grapes of Portugal is something of a nightmare.  To be as small as it is, Portugal probably causes me more headaches and more confusion than any other wine region.  For some reason, nearly every grape grown in Portugal has a ton of synonyms and the primary name for the grape changes from region to region within the country.  Further, as you might expect given their geographical proximity, there are a lot of grapes that are common to both Spain and Portugal, but pretty much none of them go by the same name in each country.  Some of them are pretty easy to spot and sort out (like Albariño and Alvarinho), but for others, there's no way you could guess that the grapes were identical.  Take the case of Tempranillo.  In Portugal, Tempranillo is typically called Aragonez or Tinta Roriz, while in Spain, it is mostly called Tempranillo but is also known variously as Cencibel, Tinta de Toro, and Tinto Fino.   All you can really do is try to memorize the synonyms yourself because, as you can see, there really isn't any kind of clue in the various names themselves that would let you know that you are dealing with a single grape.

That's a problem, but it's a problem that is much easier to sort out than the use of a single grape name as a synonym for a variety of different, unrelated grapes.  This is something like the Trebbiano problem in Italy where there are a handful of different grapes with the word Trebbiano in their name which, it turns out, aren't related to one another at all.  This is the kind of problem Arinto has in Portugal, and it caused me quite a bit of confusion before I was able to finally sort it all out.  When I bought the wine that I'll be writing about below, I looked it up in Wikipedia when I was in the store and read this sentence: "Arinto is a synonym of Malvasia Fina and Loureiro Blanco," which I interpreted to mean Arinto = Malvasia Fina = Loureiro Blanco.  Which, it turns out, isn't true at all.  What it means is that Malvasia Fina is known as Arinto in some places and Loureiro Blanco is known as Arinto in some places as well, but the names Malvasia Fina, Loureiro Blanco and Arinto refer to three distinct grape varieties which aren't related to one another (the Madeira grape Sercial is also sometimes called Arinto but isn't related to the other three grapes either).  Just to add a bit to the confusion, Tempranillo is also known in some parts of Portugal as Arinto Tinto, though, you guessed it, it isn't related to Arinto in any way.

Thinking I finally had it all straight, I went to the VIVC database today to see what information was in there about Arinto.  A search for "Arinto" brings up this page.  The "Prime Name" field is where you're supposed to look to find the grape you're looking for, as the "Cultivar name" field pulls up every occurrence of the search term as a synonym of other grapes.  As you can see from the list, there is no "Prime name" entry for Arinto though there are 29 entries in the "Cultivar name" column that have Arinto somewhere in them.  It turns out that Arinto is officially known as Arinto de Bucelas which, I'm guessing, is an effort to lessen confusion given the proliferation of the Arinto name and possibly to differentiate it from another grape called Arinto the Douro Valley which is now officially known as Arinto do Douro.  These two Arintos are not related but, and here's the really crazy thing, Arinto do Douro is an accepted synonym for Arinto de Bucelas.

Wasn't that fun?

Anyway, the grape we're here to talk about is Arinto de Bucelas which, as you might expect, is most commonly grown in the Bucelas region of Portugal.  Bucelas is located just north of the city of Lisbon which is within the Lisboa region (which was called Estremadura until 2009 when it was changed to avoid confusion with the Spanish region Extramadura) which is a thin strip of land on the western Coast of Portugal, almost right in the middle from north to south.  Grapes have likely been grown in this region since Roman times, though the style has changed throughout the years.  In the Elizabethan age, the wine was fortified and it is thought that a reference to a wine called Charneco in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2 is a reference to Bucelas wine.  Thomas Jefferson was a fan of the lighter, unfortified wines from this region in the late 18th - early 19th centuries, as was Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, who made the wine fashionable in London where it was known as "Portuguese Hock" (Hock being an old British term for wines from Germany).  Because of this name it was suspected for many years that Arinto may be related to Riesling, but it turns out that it isn't.  In the studies that I've read, Arinto's closest relative is probably the Gouveio grape, which is called Godello in Spain (and is not to be confused with Verdelho, despite Wikipedia's efforts to lead you to believe otherwise).

Wines from Bucelas fell on hard times, though.  As the city of Lisbon and its surrounding areas grew, they overtook some of the vineyards from the region.  By the 1980's, Bucelas was a monopoly as all of the remaining vineyard land was owned by a single company who was making bad wine.  Things have changed for the better over the past decade or so as more quality-conscious producers have set about trying to revive the past glories of Bucelas wine.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Quinta da Murta Bucelas for about $9.  Wines from Bucelas must contain a minimum of 75% Arinto, but this wine is 100% (you can read the technical specs here).  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color with a greenish tint.  The nose was moderately aromatic with ripe pears, green melon, lemon peel and something faintly tropical that I wasn't able to put my finger on (banana was as close as I got).  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high, zippy kind of acidity, a hallmark of the grape.  There were flavors of lemony citrus and green apple with pineapple, lemon peel and something slightly herbal.  The wine was quite tart and was just screaming for some kind of food.  This would be great with raw oysters, grilled scallops or even chicken served in a creamy lemon sauce.  It's not a profound wine, but given the under $10 price tag, it's a pretty good deal.  I have a hard time finding wines I like to drink for under $10, but this one was satisfying and tasty.  They apparently make about 80,000 bottles of this stuff so if you run across it, give it a shot.

Aligoté - Burgundy, France and California & Washington, USA

Burgundy is a land of favored sons and ugly step children, of superstars and also-rans.  There are four grapes that are grown within this area, but two of them get all of the acclaim.  For the red grapes, Pinot Noir is the unquestionable star to Gamay's second fiddle, while for the white grapes, Chardonnay is the golden boy to Aligoté's red-headed step-child.  Acclaim for Burgundian wines made from Pinot Noir or Chardonnay is widespread and the prices for the best of these wines often reach stratospheric levels.  The best wines made from Gamay or Aligoté, by contrast, are little commented on and generally will cost you less than $20.  The class distinction between the two groups is clear and almost universally recognized by critics and connoisseurs alike.

Of the two outcasts, Aligoté has it much worse than Gamay, though.  Wines made from the Gamay grape are much more widely available to consumers than wines made from Aligoté, and you are likely to find a bottle of Gamay everywhere from your local grocery store to your favorite specialty wine shop.  Furthermore, Gamay has been given its own sub-section within Burgundy, the Beaujolais region, where it is allowed to be king.  Aligoté is given only a single village, Bouzeron (in the Côte Chalonnaise), to be a star in and wines made anywhere else within the Burgundy region can carry the general Bourgogne Aligoté label only.  Since wines made from the Aligoté grape are not entitled to any AOC classification above the general Bourgogne Aligoté, those who do grow it tend to grow it on poorer sites, such as the valley floors or the tops of the hills, where the grapes are not able to ripen properly.  Since the AOC laws allow for so much more specificity in labeling wines made from Chardonnay grapes, and since specificity in Burgundy generally means  higher prices, it makes much more fiscal sense for the growers to give Chardonnay the prime spots and relegate Aligoté to the fringes.  As a result, the wines made from those Aligoté grapes can be good, but are rarely world-class, so the growers and officials feel justified in their assessment of Aligoté as a second class grape and nobody clamors to elevate its status within the region.  The Oxford Companion to Wine offers the opinion that if it were planted on the choicest sites in Burgundy, "Aligoté could produce fine dry whites with more nerve than most Chardonnays," but concludes that this isn't practical not only for the reason outlined above, but also because these days Chardonnay has more commercial clout than any other white grape by virtue of its name alone.

It's kind of interesting that Aligoté is primarily known for its second-class citizen status in Burgundy because its plantings within Burgundy account for only a tiny fraction of its plantings worldwide.  There are about 1700 hectares of Aligoté in Burgundy (compared to nearly 13,000 for Chardonnay), but worldwide there are over 45,000 hectares of land planted to the grape, making it the 22nd most planted grape in the world.  The overwhelming majority of this land is in eastern Europe, though, in places like Romania (which has over 6000 ha of land planted to Aligoté), Ukraine, Russia and Moldova.  Since we almost never see these wines on our shelves here in the States, we still tend to view Aligoté in the context of its role in Burgundy, where it is more prized as an ingredient in a Kir cocktail (together with creme de cassis) than as a white wine.

I used a couple of family metaphors above when describing how the four Burgundian grapes relate to one another, and there's a very good reason for that.  It turns out that all four grapes are related to one another in a very interesting way.  In 1999, a UC Davis research team published a paper that showed that Pinot and another grape called Gouais Blanc were the parents of an astonishing number of French grapes (Bowers, J., Boursiquot, J., This, P., Chu, K., Johansson, H., & Meredith, C. (1999). Historical Genetics: The Parentage of Chardonnay, Gamay, and Other Wine Grapes of Northeastern France. Science, 285(5433), 1562).  Among those offspring were Chardonnay, Gamay Noir and Aligoté, among a slew of others.  Meaning that those three grapes are essentially "siblings" with Pinot as the father (this study did the research to prove the mother-father relationship between the grapes).  Eagle eyed readers may note that I've only indicated Pinot as the father, rather than Pinot Noir, Blanc or Gris.  The reason is that the techniques used for these pedigree studies is unable to differentiate between clonal variants of a given cultivar.  When samples of Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris are analyzed using this technique, they all come back as identical since the lighter berried grapes are merely skin color mutations of Pinot Noir.  These studies, then, cannot say conclusively that Pinot Noir was the father of these grapes, but since it has had the longest history within the region, there's every reason to think that it is.

I was able to find and try three different wines made from the Aligoté grape.  The first was the 2009 René Cacheux et Fils Bourgogne Aligoté which I picked up for about $14.  In the glass the wine had a pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with green apple and lemon-lime citrus fruits with a kind of biscuitty, pie-dough sort of element to it.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were citrusy fruits (leaning slightly more towards lime than lemon) with creamy pear and that same biscuitty kind of flavor.  The wine finished with a nice clean, steely kind of minerality.  Of the three I tried, this was the most balanced.  Aligoté is a high-acid grape which can be difficult to tame if the fruit isn't entirely ripe.  This wine reigned the acid in nicely and had a nice core of simple fruit that was tasty and refreshing.  It's not the kind of wine that will change your life, but it is a very nice value wine at less than $15 per bottle.  I spotted this wine on the shelf at several different shops within the Boston area so it should be easily findable for those interested.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 Jed Steele "Shooting Star" Aligoté, which is vinified in California from fruit grown in Washington state.  Retail on this bottle was also about $14.  In the glass the wine was a silvery lemon color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with lemon citrus and grapefruit along with a leesy, cheesy, buttermilk kind of aroma.  Oz Clarke, in his Grapes and Vines, does say that Aligoté can have a kind of buttermilk tang to it, and once you read that sentence, you'll swear you smell and taste it in almost every Aligoté you ever come across.  On the palate the wine was light bodied with screamingly high acidity.  There were lemon, green apple and under-ripe pineapple fruits with a touch of coconut with a sour, really funky cheesy aspect to it.  I have in my notes that this was "like battery acid and bad cheese," and even sitting here writing this note I'm wincing from the memory of this wine.  I do love high acid whites, but this was tooth-strippingly acidic with a bit too much funk for my tastes.  It was a struggle not only to finish the bottle, but even to finish each glass and is not the kind of thing I'd recommend to anyone.

The third wine that I tried was from one of my favorite producers, Calera, located on Mt. Harlan in California.  Ever since I read the book The Heartbreak Grape, which profiles owner and winemaker Josh Jensen, I've been following this estate with great interest.  Their Pinot Noirs are fantastic and are among some of my all time favorite wines.  This Aligoté is made from estate fruit that is grown on only 3 acres of land.  The wine is aged for six months in older oak barrels and undergoes 100% malolactic fermentation.   They made only 116 cases of this wine in 2009, and I picked this bottle up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $23.  In the glass the wine had a lemon gold color with some greenish tints.  The nose was reserved with ripe apple and pineapple fruit and subtle leesy kind of aroma that smelled a little like buttermilk.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of ripe baked apples and creamy pear with some pastry dough and dairy-ish (buttermilk again?) notes as well.  This was a very good wine that I really enjoyed, but I would have liked to see a bit more acid in it.  In reviewing the 2010 batch of wines, Robert Parker remarked "Calera has once again made the finest Aligoté in America."  It's certainly the best American Aligoté that I've tasted, but for my money, the Burgundian example was the real winner, especially at almost $10 less than this example.  I did really like this wine, though, and have actually turned the label into a coaster for my end table at home.

Delaware - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

I'm betting that if I asked you where the Delaware grape is from, and if I forced you to hazard a guess, you'd probably say the state of Delaware.  There's a pretty good chance that some of you who have heard of the grape before have just assumed that it's named for the US state (which is itself named for Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr) and not given it a second thought.  That's certainly the conclusion that I naturally jumped to the first time I read about it, and it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense.  Ah, but our intuitions can be dangerous things that often lead us down the road of misinformation, and in this case, would definitely lead us astray if we relied only on them.  No, the Delaware grape is not named for the state of Delaware, but rather for the town of Delaware, located in the state of Ohio.

Why Delaware, Ohio?  Because that's where the grape is from, you might guess.  But, no, the Delaware grape is thought to have originated from the garden of one Paul Provost in Frenchtown, New Jersey.  The story goes that in the early 1800's, a Mr. Warford brought the grapes from New Jersey to Ohio and planted them in his own garden.  At some point, a Mr. Heath also got his hands on cuttings of the grape and both farmers were growing it in 1849 when Abram Thompson, who was editor of the local newspaper in Delaware, Ohio, became aware of it and decided to try to figure out what it was and where it came from.  In 1851 he brought the grape to the attention of the Ohio Pomological Society whose investigations into the grape's origins led them back to Provost's farm, but Provost had passed away in the interim, taking the story of how he acquired the grape with him.  Some claimed that it was brought over by one of Provost's brothers who was living in Italy, which caused the grape to be known as the "Italian wine grape" for awhile.  Others believed the grape came from a German who had spent some time with John Hare Powell in Philadelphia who was an agriculturist as well as a state senator.  Some believed that the German had brought the grape with him from Germany while others believed he picked it up from Powell on his travels.  At the end of the day, though, none of the theories had any evidence to support them, and Occam's Razor ultimately came into effect.  If we can trace the grape back to Provost's farm and no further, it stands to reason that it originated there as a spontaneous field crossing that was grown from seed.

When Thompson first came across the grape, it was generally referred to either as Powell or Heath by the locals.  Thompson sent some of the grapes to AJ Downing, editor of The Horticulturist magazine, who dubbed it Delaware since the samples he received were from the town of Delaware, Ohio.  The grape was added to the American Pomological Society's grape list as a "new variety which promises well."  Two years later it was included in their list of recommended varieties.  The grape was a sensation and was the subject of several articles in the horticultural journals of the time which delighted in debates over its origins and its parentage.  People were so pleased with the quality of wine made from the grape that many thought it must be a 100% vinifera plant at first, but this theory was quickly abandoned.  Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet, one of the leading French horticulturists of the time, believed that the grape was likely a hybrid with vinifera, labrusca, cinerea, and aestivalis in its background.  TV Munson, the Texas horitculturist and grape breeder, believed that it was a hybrid of labrusca and bourquiniana grapes with a bit of vinifera thrown in as well.  He further believed that one of the parents was likely a grape called Elsingburgh which was from an area not far from Frenchtown, NJ.  Today, the VIVC indicates that Delaware was likely the result of a vinifera vine crossed with a labrusca x aestivalis hybrid, but no specific grape names are given.

All of the information above is from The Grapes of New York published in 1908 (which you can read in its entirety here).  The section on Delaware begins:

"Delaware is the American grape par excellence. Its introduction raised the standard of quality in our viticulture to that of the Old World, for there is no variety of Vitis vinifera more richly or more delicately flavored or with a more agreeable aroma than the Delaware. This variety is rightly used wherever American grapes are grown as the standard whereby to gauge the quality of other grapes."

The grape was prized for its "constitution which enables it to withstand climatic conditions to which all but the most hardy varieties will succumb, and so elastic as to adapt it to many soils and conditions, and to bear under most situations an abundant crop."  It was considered second only to the Concord grape in terms of its quality as a grape for home gardeners, as a table grape and as a wine grape.  Today, though, Delaware is not held in nearly such high esteem (though it is called "one of the highest quality American varieties for white wine" in an Iowa State horticulture program publication, which is a bit like being called the most beautiful pig at the slaughterhouse).  It is very cold hardy but is also susceptible to a large number of diseases that make it less desirable than some of the newer hybrids.  It is still grown in the Midwest and in some of the cooler regions of New York and used to make wine there, though it is probably most popular in Japan where it is used as a table grape.  

During my trip to the Finger Lakes region of New York a few months back I was able to pick up two bottles made from the Delaware grape from the same producer but in two different styles.  The first wine was the 2009 "Long Stem Pink," a semi-sweet rosé  from Lakewood Vineyards on Seneca Lake which set me back about $8 at the winery.  The Delaware grape has pink skins, as you can see from the photo above, which can impart a pinkish hue to the wine if left in contact with the juice for a short time after pressing.  In the glass, the wine was an orangey salmon pink kind of color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with a simple, one-note grapey kind of aroma.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and a sweetness level somewhere north of off-dry but not quite medium sweet.  There were flavors of candied apples, strawberries and wild grapes.  There was a slight bitter edge to it on the finish, but overall it was simple, sweet and fruity which is generally all these kinds of wines aspire to be.  I drank this with a cheddar and chipotle sauced pasta with sausage and broccoli and it performed admirably against the spice and fat of the dish.  If you like sweet table wines with those grapey, "foxy" aromas and flavors, you'll like this a lot, probably, but if you despise and revile those kinds of wines on principle you're probably better off giving this one a pass.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 "Glaciovinum" from Lakewood Vineyards, which is an ice wine made from Delaware grapes.  It comes in half bottles (375 mL) and costs about $16 at the winery.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep gold color.  The nose was very aromatic with honey and grapefruit that turns towards those characteristic grapey notes as the wine warms up.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and a very high sweetness level.  There were flavors of honey, ripe grapefruit, apple pie and mandarin oranges when I served the wine right out of the refrigerator.  As the wine warmed up a bit, the grapey labrusca flavors showed up though they never really took over.  Temperature was the key as the second glass I poured myself from the open bottle right out of the fridge showed the same kind of progression.  I was pretty impressed with this wine overall. I thought it was fairly well balanced and had enough going on to keep me interested in it.  The price is what ultimately enticed me into buying a bottle for myself as it can be very difficult to find ice wines for less than $20.  While I probably wouldn't buy the rosé again, I would definitely give this wine another try if I ran across it somewhere for around this price.  I think this wine's labrusca flavors are muted enough that even seasoned labrusca haters might find something to like here.

Airén - Castilla La Mancha, Spain

Welcome, friends and neighbors, to Fringe Wine's 150th post!  To commemorate this special occasion I've decided to do something a little bit different.  Today's post will cover a grape that is actually the most planted grape (in terms of area) on planet Earth.  The name of that grape is Airén and it is planted on over 750,000 acres of land worldwide, though nearly all of it is located in central Spain.  For comparison's sake, it is estimated that Chardonnay is planted on about 400,000 acres of land throughout the world while Cabernet Sauvignon is planted on an estimated 435,000 acres.  Yet if you walk into your local wine store, chances are that you'll find dozens of bottles of Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, but you probably won't find a bottle of Airén.  Why is that?

Part of the reason is that Airén is planted at extremely low densities throughout central Spain (and is grown virtually nowhere else in the world).  While the grape does hold the title for most planted grape in terms of total area, it is thought that Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon may be the most planted grape in the world in terms of total vines planted.  The average planting density for Airén vines in La Mancha is about 500-600 vines per acre.  By contrast, the planting densities in Bordeaux are around 3200 vines per acre on the low end and over 4000 vines per acre on the high end.  The area where Airén is primarily grown is the La Mancha plateau in central Spain whose name comes from the Moorish word "Manxa" which means "parched earth."  As you might expect, this area is very hot and very dry with summertime temperatures often in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and yearly rainfall totals averaging about 16 inches per year.  In these extreme conditions, spacing the vines far apart serves two functions.  First, the space allows air to circulate freely around the vines which helps them cool off.  The area is also prone to severe frosts in the winter and, paradoxically, the increased air circulation can minimize frost damage to the vines as well.

The main reason for the wide spacing, though, has to do with the low rainfall the area receives.  High planting densities mean that there are a lot of plants and a lot of plants need a lot of water.  Spacing the plantings out lessens the competition between vines and allows them to survive on the meager resources, especially water, that the parched environment can provide.  Irrigation is technically illegal for vines in the EU, though the Oxford Companion to Wine assures us that this restriction is "easy, if initially quite expensive, to flout."  Given that wines produced from Airén grapes do not command any kind of premium, the costs associated with irrigation are probably not worth it for the growers, so the wide spacing is employed because, frankly, there aren't many other crops that could grow effectively and profitably in those conditions anyway.

Even if we factor in the low planting densities, though, Airén plantings are still about 1/5th of Cabernet Sauvignon plantings worldwide, which is a heck of a lot of vines.  Airén is much more widely planted than Sangiovese, for example, but Sangiovese-based wines are far more common than Airén based wines.  The answer to the riddle of Airén's lack of presence on the international wine scene is pretty simple.  The grapes make mostly uninteresting wines.  This was much more true about 30-40 years ago when the wines made from Airén grapes were often sloppily made and usually oxidized.  As temperature controlled fermentation vessels made their way into the area, the wine quality improved dramatically, though "neutral" and "crisp" seems to be the highest summit that wines from Airén grapes are capable of achieving.

Today most of the juice from Airén grapes is used either in bulk wine production or is shipped off and distilled into brandy, with only a small amount used for the production of quality table wines.  Why devote so much land to such an unprofitable and uninteresting grape?  In short, the climate is to blame again.  Airén is the grape of choice in this region because of its ability to survive and thrive in the hot, dry conditions of La Mancha.  Its drought resistance in particular has endeared it to the growers here for many centuries, with the earliest recorded mention of Airén occurring in 1615.  Its fortunes are beginning to turn, though, as many growers in central Spain are pulling up their Airén vines and replacing them with red grapes like Tempranillo.  EU vine pull incentives seem to be accelerating this trend, though Airén has a long way to go before it is in any danger of disappearing completely.

I was able to try two very different wines made from the Airén grape.  The first was the 2009 Casa del Aire from the Castilla region of Spain which I was able to find for about $9.  This wine was sealed with a synthetic cork that had leaked a bit in my cellar, leaving a bit of mold on the lip of the bottle.  I wiped the bottle clean and checked to see if the wine had oxidized, but it seemed to be mostly OK.  In the glass the wine was a fairly light lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with green apple, pear and lemony citrus fruits.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of lemon peel and lemons with pear and a bit of green apple.  It was quite bitter and bland.  It is possible that it suffered somewhat as a result of the cork failure, but I've had other wines made from this grape and, in general, there isn't much to them.  This wine was pretty typical in that the best you can really hope for is a crisp, clean white wine that won't run you more than about $10 retail.  Given the wide variety of very good value wines on the market today, it's hard to recommend this wine unless you're just really looking for something you've never tried before.

The second wine that I tried was much more unusual.  It was an orange wine from Vinos Ambiz that was limited in production to only 200 bottles.  For those of you who don't know, orange wines are wines made from white grapes where the juice has been allowed to sit on the grape skins for some time after pressing.  In the usual process for making white wines, the grapes are pressed and the juice is separated from the rest of the grape matter immediately.  In red wine production, the juice is allowed to sit on the skins for awhile in order to pick up coloring and other flavor compounds from the skins.  So, essentially, orange wines are white wines that are made using the process for red wines.  Orange refers to the deeper color that many of these wines pick up as a result of their extended skin contact.  For those who are still confused, I'd highly recommend reading this illustrated blog post over at Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews.  To the left is a picture of what this orange wine looked like in my glass.  As you can see, not only is the color much deeper, but the wine is cloudy as well, which in this case is because the wine is unfined and unfiltered before being bottled.

I was able to pick this wine up from my friends over at the Spirited Gourmet in Belmont for about $25.  As you can see, I had bottle number 88 of 200.  The back label tells us that the wine is made from grapes harvested from 30 year old vines.  Further, there are no pesticides, fungicides or fertilizers used in the vineyard and absolutely nothing was added to the juice before, during or after fermentation.  Natural yeasts from the vineyard were used for the fermentation itself.  These guys are unabashedly in the "natural wine" camp, and you can read more about their philosophy on viticulture and winemaking at this blog here.

In the glass, this wine was a cloudy pinkish-orange color that looked an awful lot like grapefruit juice.  The nose was very aromatic with citrusy fresh-cut grapefruit and orange aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There was a kind of fruit cocktail thing going on in my glass with a bit of bitter orange peel and orange, pink grapefruit, apple, pear and white grape fruit flavors.  Unfortunately, a lot of these flavors were masked by a chalky bitterness that was much too present for my tastes.

Here's the thing about a wine like this.  If you took one look at the picture of the wine in my glass and read about their non-interventionist approach and you felt yourself starting to drool and get excited, then you'll probably really like this wine.  If you've never heard of "natural wine" or "orange wine" and are still trying to figure out why you can't see through the liquid in the picture above, then you might want to give this wine a wide berth.  Is it a good wine?  In its way, yes, it is good.  It's interesting and thought provoking in a lot of different ways.  Is it for everyone?  Absolutely not.  If you prefer your wine crystal clear and squeaky clean, the first bottle I wrote about is definitely more your speed.  For the rest of you, there is now, at most, 199 bottles of this wine left.  Good luck tracking it down.

Bonus trivia: In Japanese, the word "airen" means "soulmate."  It also means "lover" in Chinese.

Hondarrabi Zuri - Bizkaiko, Txakolina, Spain

**I've done a lot of research since I first wrote this post, which is summarized here.  The post below still has my tasting note and the early stages of my investigation, but those curious about the identity of Hondarrabi Zuri are encouraged to read the newer post linked above**

When I started calling up my usual sources for today's grape, I wasn't really expecting any surprises.  After all, I'd written about Hondarrabi Beltza here about six months ago and there really weren't any big shockers there.  I figured that writing about Hondarrabi Zuri would be as simple as finding a few facts out about the grape, writing my impressions and moving on.  The first source I checked was the Oxford Companion to Wine and the bombshell was waiting for me in the last line of the Hondarrabi Zuri entry: "DNA profiling has surprisingly shown that hondarrabi zuri is the same as the American hybrid noah."

Regular readers will note that in the last post I wrote on the Turbiana grape, I expressed my frustration with the fact that the Oxford Companion to Wine frequently refers to "DNA profiling" without providing specific citations to the original source material.  This particular entry is no different and it really serves as a great example of why you should always try as hard as you can to find the original source material if you are really interested in learning about something.  I have been scouring the internet for hours and have not only been unable to locate any paper indicating that Hondarrabi Zuri and Noah are the same grape, but I haven't been able to find another site on the internet reporting that information either.  The closest thing I've been able to find is an off-hand reference in a paper from 2002 which was analyzing the DNA of many different Spanish wine grapes (citation: Martin, J, Borrego, J, Cabello, F, & Ortiz, J 2003, 'Characterization of Spanish grapevine cultivar diversity using sequence-tagged microsatellite site markers', Genome, 46, 1, p. 10, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 1 March 2012.).  In that paper, the authors note that "Ondarrabi Zuri," which is actually the proper cultivar name for the Hondarrabi Zuri grape, had a very unique genotype that could likely be explained by its "probable hybrid origin."  Their citation for this probable hybrid origin, though, is an unpublished paper by a different team of Spanish researchers.  What their paper is clear on, though, is that Hondarrabi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza are not related genetically, as they differed at every section of DNA that the scientists analyzed.

At this point, without any specific citation, all I can really say is that Hondarrabi Zuri is genetically very different from other Spanish grapes.  The VIVC database, which does use DNA research to organize their entries, does indicate the species of each grape they have an entry for.  Their entry on Hondarrabi Zuri, though, indicates that it is a vinifera species of vine.  Noah is not listed as an accepted synonym for the grape and, further, if you go to the entry on Noah, that grape is listed as an "interspecific crossing" with a parentage of v. riparia and v. labrusca.  The VIVC is usually pretty reliable but they certainly aren't foolproof and I've found that some of their entries lag a little bit behind the most current research.  However, since I have had no luck tracking down any published papers providing proof of a link between Hondarrabi Zuri and Noah or even between Hondarrabi Zuri and any hybrid grape, I'm going to guess that the VIVC hasn't been able to find any either and that explains their classification of the two grapes within their database.

So, here we are.  The Oxford Companion to Wine says something that could be true, but which is very controversial if it is (after all, hybrid grapes are not allowed in wines made in the EU).  But, since I can't find any other corroborating source, I have to withhold judgement one way or the other.  It seems like the kind of thing that should be pretty obvious since Noah is known for having that "foxy" aroma and flavor bemoaned by so many wine critics.  In the paper cited above, the authors do mention that Hondarrabi Zuri has a particularly foxy character, but I've never picked up on it in any of the wines that I've tried from the grape.  Most other online sources, like Wikipedia, believe that Hondarrabi Zuri is native to the Basque region of Spain.  I can't find any reference for how long Hondarrabi Zuri has been known in the Basque region of Spain, which would be helpful since we know that Noah was created in 1868 in Illinois.  However long it has been there, as of 2004 it was planted on about 900 acres of land in Spain, primarily in the Txakoli regions of northeastern Spain.  There is another grape in the Basque region called Hondarrabi Zuri Zerratie which, I believe, is the Petit Courbu of Southwest France.

I was able to try a bottle of the 2009 Berroia Txakoli which is 90% Hondarrabi Zuri, 6% Folle Blanche and, oddly, 4% Riesling.  The wine is from the tiny Bizkaiko Txakolina region, which covers a mere 140 acres of land.  Hondarrabi Beltza is generally the preferred grape here, but not in this wine.  In the glass the wine was a very pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was shy with some white peach and lemon-lime citrus aromas that never really open up.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid.  There were flavors of fresh lemony citrus and white peach with a touch of lime and a kind of chalky minerality on the finish.  I really enjoyed the contrast between the broad peachy flavors and the sharp, zippy citrus. The chalkiness does eventually give way to a clean, stony minerality as the wine opens up.  I've always enjoyed wines from this region and find that their acidity helps them complement a wide variety of foods.  They remind me of Riesling both in their flavor profiles and in their versatility at the table.  They do tend to run a bit expensive, though, so if you're looking at something at the $10 end of the market, you probably won't find a Txakoli to love, but around the $20 price point there are many options, nearly all of which are interesting and quite tasty.


**UPDATE**

This issue vexed me enough to email one of the authors of the article I cited above, Dr. Jesús Maria Ortiz of the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.  Dr. Ortiz informed me that there are two different grapes known as Ondarrabi Zuri in the Basque region.  The most common is the vinifera species used in the wines made in the Txakoli regions of Spain.  This Ondarrabi Zuri is the grape that you taste when you buy wines that indicate that they are made from Hondarrabi Zuri.  The other is a hybrid grape which is "almost inexistent in the region (ie the Basque country) at this time," though it was at one point somewhat widely planted.  I'm not sure why, but in the study cited above, the research group was using a sample of the hybrid grape and not the vinifera grape, which gave them such odd results.  Whatever study the Oxford Companion to Wine is citing probably had the same issue, which would lead them to their bizarre conclusion that the Hondarrabi Zuri of Txakoli fame is the same as the American hybrid Noah.

I further asked Dr. Ortiz if the vinifera Hondarrabi Zuri was related to Hondarrabi Beltza and he provided me with the DNA microsatellite profiles that indicate that the two grapes do not share a common parent and are not closely related to one another despite their similar names ("zuri" is Basque for white and "beltza" is Basque for black).  Dr. Ortiz has infoprmed me that the Hondarrabi part is from a town in the Basque country called Fuenterrabía, which is spelled Hondarribia in the Basque language.  This town is very close to the French border, and Dr. Ortiz's explanation is that several grape varieties came into Spain from France through this town.  When they were distributed to other regions within the Basque region, they were called Hondarrabi after the town they were distributed through.  Many of the other grapes grown within the Basque country are indeed French transplants, such as Petit Courbu and Folle Blanche (and, as noted above, Petit Courbu is known as Hondarrabi Zuri Zerratie).