Txakoli (sha-ko-LEE)

Txakoli is made from the indigenous white grape called hondurrabi zuri. Zuri means white in Basque; hondurrabi is a village near the French border. Dry as a bone, and extremely sleek on the palate, txakoli is often slightly carbonated and is served in a unique manner called “breaking.” To break txakoli, the wine is poured from a height of several feet into a little tumbler glass (splashing some on the floor seems to be SOP). The flight through air is said to open up the txakoli and make it smell and taste more vivid.

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“It’s hard to talk about flavor. Tasting something is such a direct neural jolt; words will always seem clumsy and vague. ‘Spicy’ does not begin to express the riot of electrical fires sparking through your skull after you eat a Thai chile. ‘Sour’ hardly touches the way a fresh lemon grips your whole consciousness and squeezes until it weeps.

So we turn to metaphor. Elderflower kombucha is a bottled Scandinavian summer: mild, light, yellow, easy. Coconut water is a Caribbean afternoon. Chianti, as any sommelier will tell you, is the blood of a mortally wounded Vespa. … Coca-Cola is all the gallons of lighter fluid harvested from discarded Bics in the aftermath of a Bruce Springsteen concert.”

—René Redzepi and David Zilber in The Noma Guide to Fermentation (Artisan 2018)

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