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  Their citation for this probable hybrid origin, though, is an unpublished paper by a different team of Spanish researchers.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).

Hondarrabi Beltza - Getariako and Bizkaiko Txakolina, Spain

Autochthonous (pronounced aw-tok-thuh-nuhs) is a fun word.  It's come up a bit in some of the research I've done and I've never bothered to look it up until today.  It's essentially a really fancy word for "indigenous" or "native"  and, for some reason, is used with shocking frequency to describe wine grapes.  If you can wrap your tongue around it after a few glasses of wine, you can throw it around at your next soiree and impress, well, the kind of people who are impressed by those sorts of things.

It came up for me today as I was doing some research on the grape Hondarrabi Beltza.  There are two Hondarrabis: Zuri, the white skinned version (which will be talked about in a separate post) and Beltza, the red-skinned version, which we'll talk about here.  Both versions are autochthonal (I think that's the correct part of speech) to the Basque region, which spans the Spanish/French border in northeastern Spain (and thus southwestern France).  Politically and sociologically, there's a lot of stuff to write about regarding the Basque area, but I'm going to forgo most of that as it falls a bit outside of my sphere of interest.

The area of the Basque Country that we are concerned with here is a sub-section within Spain (also, somewhat confusingly, simply referred to as "Basque Country") which is essentially autonomous and has very little to do with the rest of the country.  This area has much cooler weather than other parts of Spain and gets a lot of rain which creates conditions that don't exactly add up to what one would usually consider prime wine real estate, but the tradition of wine here goes back several thousand years and the people are fiercely independent and take a great deal of pride in the wines they are able to produce from their land.

Within this region, there are three small (and I mean small...each area is less than 100 hectares) areas which produce a wine known as Txakoli (pronounced cha-co-li).  I'll talk more about two of the regions below, but the smallest of the three regions is called Arabako Txakolina and it consists of a scant 50 hectares of land.  This area was created (for DO purposes) in 2003 and, unlike the other areas, it allows for some French grapes (like Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Petit Courbu) to be used.  For the most part, the Txakoli wines are high acid, slightly sparkling white wines made from the Hondarrabi Zuri grape with some Hondarrabi Beltza blended in.  

The first wine that I tried was a rosato wine from the Getariako Txakolina region, which is the largest of the three areas with 84 hectares of land under vine.  The blend here is 50% Hondarrabi Beltza and 50% Hondarrabi Zuri.  Both grapes are grown in this region, but for the white wines, the Beltza grapes are pressed and immediately run off the skins so that the wine stays white.  For this wine, I believe that the Beltza grapes may be made into a red wine and then blended with the white wine from the Zuri grapes to create a pink wine, but I'm not totally sure (if anyone knows, please feel free to correct me in the comments).  Whatever the case may be, the importer claims that the wine is made from vines that are over 150 years old.  If you look closely at the label, you can see a little picture of a guy wearing an awesome hat.  That guy is Juan Sebastian Elcano who was a Basque explorer who was technically the first person to circumnavigate the globe (he was Magellan's second in command and took over the ship after Magellan died prior to the circumnavigating journey's end).  When he returned to his home after his trip, he was celebrated with Txacoli wine and they're obviously still pretty proud of him today.

I picked up this bottle of 2009 Ameztoi Rubentis Txakoli for about $20 from my friends at Curtis Liquors.  In the glass, the wine had a pale salmon-pink color and was showing a little petillance.  The nose was very aromatic with fresh cut strawberries and watermelon aromas.  It was all fruit on the nose, but that didn't carry over so much to the palate.  The wine was light bodied with high acidity and just a slight touch of fizz to it.  It clocks in at 10.5% alcohol, but was bone dry with some strawberry fruit but it mostly had a minerally kind of taste to it that reminded me of quinine.  On the whole, this was a little like drinking slightly fruity tonic water, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not exactly a great thing either.  It was very clean and refreshing and would complement a lot of seafood dishes.

The other wine I was able to try was from the smaller Bizkaiko Txakolina region, which has only about 60 hectares of land under vine.  Hondarrabi Beltza is more common in this area and they make more red table wines than the other Txakoli producing regions.  The Gorrondona estate has 12 hectares of land under vine and only two of those are dedicated to Hondarrabi Beltza.  They claim that these vines pre-date the phylloxera epidemic, which decimated the Basque region in the 19th Century.  Prior to phylloxera, it was estimated that the Basque region had more than 1,000 hectares of land under vine.  Phylloxera completely ravaged the area, decimating nearly all the vineyards, and many people didn't bother to replant afterwards, which is why today the three Txakoli regions have less than 200 hectares of land under vine.

I was able to find this bottle of the 2009 Gorrondona from my friends at The Wine Bottega for about $30.  In the glass, this wine was a medium purple-ruby color with a meaty, stewed nose.  There were aromas of stewed black cherries and something kind of tomato-y about it.  There were also spicy blackberry and black plum aromas and an earthy coffee ground smell as well.  On the palate, this was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and medium tannins that had a little bit of a grip to them.  It needed a little while to open up and when it did, there was blackberry and black cherry fruit with some peppery plum flavors and little bit of funk to it.  Many people compare these wines to the Cabernet Franc based wines from the Loire Valley, and I can kind of see that.  It was a little more intense than many Cab Franc based wines that I've had and definitely had a little more funkiness to it.  It was a very savory wine that would go well with many meat dishes.  $30 is pretty steep for what you're getting, but considering the extraordinarily limited production, it's probably not that bad of a deal.