Hondarrabi Zuri

Hondarrabi Zuri is the white grape of Txakoli, the sharp, faintly fizzy wine of the Spanish Basque coast. The name means roughly white grape of Hondarribia, the border town at the mouth of the Bidasoa, and it covers the vineyards of the three small Txakoli appellations strung along the Bay of Biscay — Getaria, Bizkaia and Álava.

The growing conditions explain the wine. This is a wet, green, Atlantic coastline, the vines trained high on pergolas to keep air moving through the canopy and rot at bay, the fruit ripening slowly under cloud. The result is very high acidity, low alcohol and a saline, almost sea-spray quality that locals treat as the defining marker of the style.

Traditionally the wine was bottled with a little dissolved carbon dioxide left over from fermentation, which is why it arrives with a faint prickle rather than a proper sparkle, and why it is poured from a height into a flat tumbler — the fall knocks the wine about and lifts what fizz there is. The theatre is genuine and so is the effect.

In the glass it is pale, tart and direct: green apple, lime, cut grass, a mineral bite. It is not a wine that rewards contemplation and is not meant to; it exists to be drunk cold alongside pintxos and grilled fish. A newer wave of producers is making riper, still, sometimes barrel-aged versions with real weight, which divides opinion locally about as sharply as you would expect.

One complication worth knowing: the name has historically been applied to more than one distinct variety, and DNA work has shown that vines sold as Hondarrabi Zuri are not always the same grape. Any description of it is therefore a description of a style as much as of a single variety.