Why it matters
The producer
In 2007, three brothers walked into a winery their father had built to produce two million bottles a year and decided to make something else entirely. Iñaki, Mikel, and Xabi Sanz had grown up watching Antonio Sanz run Vinícola Corellana in Corella, a town in the southern reaches of Navarra, and when they joined the operation they brought a different idea about what southern Navarra could produce. They scaled back output by more than eighty percent, shifted the entire focus to native varieties and old Garnacha bush vines, and renamed the estate after the thrush, a small bird whose Spanish name, zorzal, is also the estate logo.
Mikel tends the 52 hectares of vineyards, Iñaki runs the winery, and Xabi handles the commercial side. The split is clean and functional, and the wines reflect a collective conviction rather than a solo auteur project: low-intervention farming, minimal cellar handling, and the specific freshness that the Fitero foothills produce in a subregion better known for weight.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Corella sits in the Ribera Baja, the southern sector of Navarra, where the climate turns markedly continental: long dry summers, cold winters, and roughly 500 millimetres of annual rainfall. Most of the subregion grows grapes on the flat, sun-exposed Ebro Valley floor, and the wines carry the heat of that position. Fitero is different. The town marks the first foothills of the Sistema Ibérico mountain range, so the vineyards here climb above the plain and catch cooler air. The effect in the glass is measurable: the wines carry more freshness and acidity than a Ribera Baja label alone would lead a buyer to expect.
Fitero falls within the broader Navarra appellation, and wines from the estate carry that designation on the label. The mountain edge gives the address its character, and Zorzal has built its range around what that microclimate makes possible.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
All vineyard work is done by hand. The Sanz brothers do not till the soil, instead allowing native plants to establish as ground cover between the vines. Compost provides nutrition. The combination builds soil biology rather than depleting it, and the undisturbed topsoil holds moisture longer through the dry Fitero summers.
Bush-vine training without trellising means each plant supports itself and grows in the traditional gobelet shape. Yields are lower than trellised systems, canopy management is labor-intensive, and the fruit that comes in has spent longer on older wood, concentrating its flavor without irrigation.
Wines to know
The range in view
Garnacha anchors the range. Twenty-five of the estate's 52 hectares are planted to traditional bush vines, and Garnacha appears at every level of the lineup, from the estate bottling drawn from multiple parcels to the single-site work from Pontigos. The estate Garnacha is light in color, aromatic, and built around red cherry and plum fruit with pepper and ginger notes. The texture is silky and the acidity carries grip without heaviness.
Graciano is one of the native varieties grown at the estate. A late-ripening, deeply colored, high-acid grape native to Navarra and Rioja, it is almost always used as a blending component to add color and acid to Tempranillo-based wines. Zorzal bottles it as a single variety.