Fetească Albă - Cotnari, Romania

It's been quite awhile since we visited the land of Romania.  Several years back I wrote a post about a blended white wine from Romania that I tried that contained three Romanian grapes heavy on the diacritical marks: Fetească Albă, Frâncuşă and Tămâiosă.  Romanian wine isn't that easy to find in my neck of the woods, so it has taken awhile for me to revisit this country, but I've recently found a few interesting Romanian wines and hope to be able to write about some of them over the next few weeks.  One of the wines that I was able to find was a varietal Fetească Albă, and that's the one I'd like to write about today.

I gave a brief capsule history of Romania and Romanian wine in my prior post, so interested readers are advised to skim that piece for more information on those topics.  In brief, Romanian wine is still struggling to recover after decades of rule by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was only overthrown in 1989.  Romania has a rich history of wine making and was considered for many years to be among the greatest wine producing nations in the world, but they found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain in the early to mid 20th Century and they have struggled to re-emerge onto the world wine market.  They are currently about 12th in total production in the world, but Romanian wines are still difficult to find on American shelves.

There are actually three different Fetească grapes.  Fetească Neagră is a black skinned grape that does not appear to actually be related to the other Fetească grapes at all.  The two white-berried forms are Fetească Albă and Fetească Regală, which are sometimes said to be subvarieties of the same grape, which isn't really accurate.  Some sources also indicate that Fetească Regală is the offspring of Fetească Albă and Grasă de Cotnari, but this was disproven by a Hungarian research team in 2009 (citation 1).  Many of the grapes grown in Romania are also grown in Hungary, but the names of the grapes are often very different.  The Hungarian study looked at a grape they called Királyleányka, which is the same as the Fetească Regală of Romania.  They reported that the given pedigree for this grape was Leányka and Kövérszölö, which are Fetească Albă and Grasă de Cotnari, respectively.  They were able to rule out Grasă de Cotnari as one of the parents, but they also showed that there was almost certainly a parent/offspring relationship between Leányka and Királyleányka (incidentally, it turns out that the other parent for Fetească Regală is actually Frâncuşă, which was in the blend I wrote about previously (citation 3)).

I've reverted to using the Hungarian names rather than the Romanian ones there because there is apparently some controversy over whether Leányka is actually the same grape as Fetească Albă.  They have long been thought to be identical not only because they look very similar, but also because their names roughly translate to the same thing in their respective languages ("maiden's grape" or "young girl's grape").  Though nearly every resource I've read indicates that they are the same grape, the Oxford Companion to Wine cryptically mentions in both their entries on Fetească Albă and Leányka that an Austrian research team has shown that the two grapes are actually genetically distinct.  It took several hours of intense searching to even find the abstract for the paper I believe that the OCW is referencing, but I believe that I finally found it (citation 2). Though I wasn't able to read the paper, I did read the abstract, and something struck me. The relevant portion of the abstract is copied below.

"The cv. Feteasca alba is not identical to Leanika (Mädchentraube), therefore the supposed definition as synonymous cultivars is obsolete. The cv. Kiraly Leanika could be evaluated as an individual cultivar. However, synonyms were detected by comparing Chasselas de Courtillier and Madleine Royale."

This seems pretty benign, unless you remember those last two grapes mentioned from my post on Müller-Thurgau.  One of the parents of Müller-Thurgau was misidentified for many years as Chasselas de Courtiller because of a labeling mix up at a holding institution in Austria where a Madeleine Royale vine was mislabeled as Chassleas de Courtiller (it's a cool story and I'd really encourage you to read the post).  This raises several issues with the reputability of this particular paper.  First, it appears that the samples taken for this particular study were taken from Klausterneuberg, which is the same institution responsible for the mislabeled vines in the Müller-Thurgau story.  Further, their finding that Chasselas de Courtiller and Madeleine Royale are the same grape have been disproved (because of the labeling mishap), meaning that there is good cause to doubt the rest of their findings as well.  A dubious source for the plant material coupled with findings that have been disproved elsewhere means that it's difficult to take this paper's findings as fact without further corroboration.

This paper was written in 2001, and as far as I can tell, there are no other papers published since then that corroborate the results that this team found regarding Fetească Albă and Leányka.  The VIVC database considers the grapes to be identical even though they list the paper above in their extensive bibliography on the grape.  Further, in a very recent study (published in September 2012, citation 3 below) which discovered hundreds of pedigrees for different grape varieties, the author's notation for Fetească Albă is literally "Fetească Albă = Leányka."  While I wasn't able to find any direct evidence that shows that the two grapes are identical*, that certainly seems to be the common consensus and has been for some time.  There may be airtight evidence that I've overlooked somewhere, but right now, the case for the grapes being identical seems much stronger than the case against it.**

All of which finally brings us to the bottle of 2008 Cotnari Fetească Albă, which I picked up at the Wine Gallery in Brookline (who has a very nice eastern European section these days) for around $12.  In the glass, the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with peach, apricot and pineapple fruits along with some honey and honeysuckle flower as well.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  As it states on the label, it was also medium sweet.  There were flavors of pineapple and mandarin oranges along with some peach and a touch of honey.  Pineapple was far and away the dominant flavor note.  It came off a bit syrupy and probably could have used more acidity to balance it out, but overall, I thought it was a pretty good wine for only $12.  Fans of slightly sweet German wines will probably find a lot to like here, as will fans of spicy food, as this would likely match well with a variety of spicy Asian dishes.

CITATIONS

1) Kiss, E., Kozma, P., Halász, G., Molnár, S., Galbács, Z.S., Hoffmann, S., Veres, A., Galli, Z.S., Szőkel, A. and Heszky, L. 2009. Pedigree of Carpathian basin and Hungarian grapevine cultivars based on microsatellite analysis. Acta Hortitculturae (ISHS) 827:221-224

2) Regner, F.; Eisenheld, C.; Kaserer, H.; Stadlbauer, A. 2001. Weitere Sortenanalysen bei Rebe mittels genetischer Marker. [Further analyses for identification of grapevine by means of genetic markers]. Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg, Rebe und Wein, Obstbau und Früchteverwertung. 51(1) pp. 3-14.

3) Lacombe, T., Boursiquot, J.M., Laucou, V., Di Vecchi-Staraz, M., Peros, J.P., & This, P.  2012.  Large scale parentage analysis in an extended set of grapevine cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.).  Theoretical and Applied Genetics.  In press.

*This paper builds on another paper published by many of the same authors which analyzed the DNA of 4,370 different cultivars.  I wasn't able to find the list of all the grapes that were studied so I don't know whether Fetească Albă and Leányka were both in the study, but the "Fetească Albă = Leányka" notation leads me to think that perhaps they were.

**Look, I've done this dance several times already, so I'll spare everyone the rant and skip right to the point: CITE YOUR RESEARCH.   Not only for the sake of your readers, but also for the sake of the people whose ideas you're passing along, whether they're right or not.  If you didn't do the study, you need to tell your readers who did.

Dealul Cătălina - Cotnari, Romania

Romania is a country, much like Georgia, with a long vinous history that has been obscured by recent political struggles. Like Georgia, Romania was occupied and controlled by the Soviets early in the cold war, but unlike Georgia, Romania was able to shake free of Soviet influence, to some extent, in the 1960's. The man responsible for Romanian dissent against the Soviets, unfortunately, was Nicolae Ceausescu. Early in his reign, Ceausescu was open towards the United States and other Western European nations, unlike many of the Soviet Bloc countries. Later on, though, Ceausescu created a cult of personality as his reign became more dictatorial and his relationships with other countries began to break down. Ceausescu brought the country to the brink of total financial ruin before being overthrown in 1989.

As we've discussed with the nation of Georgia, a country's ability to have any presence in overseas markets generally owes a lot to it's recent geopolitical history. Being behind the Iron Curtain is not only deleterious to a country's wine making image because of trade restrictions, but communist governments typically are not focused on making quality wine so much as they are concerned with bulk wine production. Quantity is sought after rather than quality and the infrastructure within the country is set up to create ordinary bulk wine rather than fine wine. When international markets finally open up after the dissolution of Communist governments, there is no external market for this ordinary wine and the country, if it wishes to compete on the world marketplace, must begin to make significant investments in upgrading vineyards as well as winery equipment. Romania seems to be on the right track with these things, as they are currently 12th in world production. There is also currently an influx of outside investors eager to take advantage of the reasonable land costs within the country.

The Greeks brought the vine to Romania between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago (I've read some sources that say 3,000 years and some that go as high as 6,000). There is a legend that says that the Thracian god of wine was born in Romania in the Danube delta. Romania has a few viticultural areas, most of which are near the Moldovan border in Eastern Romania in what's known as Moldovan Romania. Perhaps the most famous Romanian wine producing region is Cotnari, which is located in eastern Romania very near the Moldovan border. Cotnari, at one time, was world-renowned for a sweet dessert wine somewhat like Tokaji in Hungary. Wine from this region was the favorite of Stephen the Great who ruled Moldavia in the late 15th century. The wine in question today hails from Cotnari.

Many Romanian vineyards were replanted with the common European vinifera vines after the devastating phylloxera outbreak in the 1880's but there are still a number of native Romanian/Moldovan grapes being grown throughout the country. Fetească Albă is the most widely grown and perhaps best known. The wine I tasted contained Fetească Albă as well as Frâncuşă and Tămâiosă, which, as far as I can tell, is just another name for Muscat. The wine was non-vintage and cost about $12.

In the glass, it was very pale and silvery. At first, the nose was very reserved with only some ripe pear aromas present. As the wine came to temperature and opened up a bit, there was much more peachy stone fruit aromas. On the palate the wine was off-dry with a medium body with medium acid. There were flavors of candied pear, green apple, candied orange peel, white peach and apricot. This is somewhere between a restrained muscat and a kabinett level riesling. There was kind of an odd chemical taste on the back end, but overall, this was pretty enjoyable. The wine was balanced so that the sugar wasn't overwhelming and this tasted more like a wine to serve with spicy food rather than a dessert wine.