Live life with fine Spanish wines

Over the past few months I keep coming across a white wine called Naia in the newspapers, in wine magazines and online. One of my daughters is called Naia and, as it was her birthday recently, I thought I would investigate this wine a little further.

My daughter is called Naia because, as we live in the Basque country, we thought a Basque name would be nice and it’s one of the easier Basque names to pronounce for our non-Basque relatives and friends. (It rhymes with “tie a” as in “Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree”!). My husband and I feel that it has a nice ring to it and its meaning is “desired” or “wanted”. Or, at least that’s what I thought until I started to look at online dictionaries and see that it may actually mean “wave”. I’ve asked a few Basque-speaking friends and they all agree that it does, in fact, have the first meaning. Either way, we like it.

The Naia wine is a D.O. Rueda from Valladolid province, in “la España profunda”, in other words, deepest, interior Spain. This is quite a distance from the Basque Country so I was also curious as to why a wine from that region would have a Basque name. I rang Bodegas Naia and asked them but they couldn’t tell me why the wine had been given that name.

So, anyway, I got hold of a bottle of Naia 2007 and we tried it with some friends on a sunny Sunday afternoon sitting out in the garden. The label is an unusual choice, consisting of a series of orange squiggles with the name of the wine printed in a white square in the centre in lower case letters. It’s a nice mix of geometry and artistic design and suggestive of good weather, bright summery clothes and picnics.

The wine itself is 100% Verdejo and, as is usual for Verdejo wines, it is a crisp, fresh, tangy wine. There’s a definite citrus note, grapefruit and lime, but then other softer fruit flavours come to the fore: peach, apricot, melon, which round it off very nicely. There’s an excellent balance between the initial acidity and the sweeter finish. This is a wine that is great for sipping on its own but would also be the ideal accompaniment for seafood, particularly shellfish, and for summer dishes such as salads, vegetable and chicken dishes, paella and gazpacho. If you are interested in trying something a little different from the usual Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio, this is the wine for you.

If we had known when Naia was born that there was a wine of that name, we might have thought about it twice. At least it’s a delicious wine and, like this particular namesake, has both its sweet and its not-so-sweet side!

And if she ever complains, we’ll point out that it could have been worse – we could have named her after some other great Rueda wine such as Palacio de Bornos or José Pariente or even Marqués de Riscal!

Ane Miren

Tags: Basque, Rueda, spanish wine, white wine

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 2:42 pm and is filed under About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.