It's going to be another ninety-degree day (in early June!) and today is one of the "leave the house and for god's sake move your fucking legs" days, so I will be taking a long walk in it. I am reluctant to leave yet, and though the destination is lunch, I like getting to the place where I have the lunch fairly late so that there aren't a lot of people there.

(This backfires sometimes, though, because it's a Friday afternoon and other people also take a late lunch and then just skive off the rest of the day. Or don't even bother with the lunch part. I sit at the bar, and it's fairly common to have a couple of people hitting the cocktails at two-thirty in the afternoon on Fridays. I try not to raise an eyebrow.)

One reason I'm not as faithful as I'd like to be to posting something here every day is that I get something in my head that I want to look up or say a few things about or both, and I say "I should post about that later," and then I get involved in doing other things. By the time it gets to about ten or eleven at night, I'm usually deep in story work and by then it's a problem, because I've already forgotten and it's functionally too late. I have to post before midnight, otherwise it's the next day, see.

Today, since it's too early to leave the house yet, I'm going to get in a few words about something I was thinking about this morning while they're still in my brain. When I get back from LTHOMG I will start doing the day's story work and that'll be all there is for the rest of the night, so get it now or we don't get it at all.

So, last night, we drank half a bottle of a light white wine I picked up. It's txakoli (which most sources say is pronounced "cha-ko-li" but some stubbornly insist is more like "sha-ko-li"), which is a very fluffy Basque wine, light, acidic and slightly fizzy, somewhere between vinho verde and hard Spanish cider. It's a good summer wine for hot days, and went well with the homemade pesto pizza.

But every time I encounter txakoli for sale in the US -- which has happened several times in the last year or so -- I think back to a book I have somewhere, I don't remember which, but it would be from circa 1970, which insists that txakoli "does not travel; it spoils if it so much as leaves this region of Spain. If you are to enjoy it, you must enjoy it on its home ground or not at all."

OK, obviously it's no longer 1970. So something has changed. What changed? That's what I've meant to look up at least ten times, but always forget to, until today.

(And let us pause here to once again appreciate one of the minor miracles of the modern world that the forces of evil haven't managed to completely destroy yet, which is that I can go look it up, as opposed to having to just shrug and go "Welp, guess I'll never know.")

ANYWAY so it TURNS OUT that what happened was an actual change, starting not long after the 1970s when my book was written, in the way wine was made and grown in the Basque provinces. (Are they provinces in Spain? I think so. I'm not going to look that up right now.)

It wasn't so much that txakoli didn't travel, it's that there really wasn't enough of it to travel, especially since the Basque government felt very protectionist about it and had rules in place to ensure it was consumed locally first -- to the extent of restricting the sales of other, non-local wines in the region.

And then the Basque winemakers decided they had bigger aspirations.

Txakoli, OG-style txakoli, is not what you'd call a world-shaking big wine anyway. It's great in the right circumstances and I like it, but again, it's a bar wine for hot days, to guzzle with your pintxos (that's tapas, but Basque), thin, acidic, and traditionally poured from a great height to increase the foam, like they do in Asturias with their cider (which is also thin and acidic and where the locals often apparently just drink the foam and discard the rest, which to me says your cider wasn't good enough to drink as is). It was grown and made locally and in smallish quantities, and some winemakers apparently started to resent the implication that they made txakoli because they couldn't manage to do any better than that.

(The Basque people are some of the most competitive people on earth. They are the kind of people who will flat-out refuse to enter any area of effort unless they feel they can flatten their competition utterly. I kind of admire that, though I suspect it also makes them very difficult to deal with sometimes.)

So, bottom line, the winemaking industry in the Basque provinces has greatly expanded since the 1970's and they now have some AOCs or whatever the equivalent abbreviation of an AOC is in Euskera, and they're making wines that are bigger and more, shall we say, advanced wines. But they're still calling most of it txakoli, that term having become somewhat generic for Basque wines.

Meanwhile, what I drank last night was the original style of txakoli, and that's what I wanted. I think it'd be a shame to have that style of wine crowded out by the more sophisticated product. Sometimes you don't want the more sophisticated product, y'know? The Portuguese have not stopped sending us vinho verde; it'd be a real shame if the Basques stopped sending us OG txakoli.

But there does seem to be some embarrassment. I have here a very revealing article from Spanish Wine Lover of about six years ago, wherein I detect a definite whiff of Wine Snottiness:

Fuck terroir. Leave terroir to the French with their wines that no one can actually buy anymore.

Actually, that may be the real gist here: Some folks in the Basque provinces are like "fuck this green fizzy shit, let's make some wines we can charge a fortune for, so that our entire output can disappear into the cellars of the super-rich who will probably never actually drink it. The French have a good scam going, we need to get in on that action."

So, as usual, the core problem is money. What else is new.