From the atlas
Viña Zorzal Wines
At A Glance
- Estate: Viña Zorzal Wines
- Location: Corella, southern Navarra, Fitero subzone (Ribera Baja)
- Key grapes: Garnacha, Graciano, Tempranillo, Mazuelo
- Hectares: 52, of which 25 planted to traditional Garnacha bush vines
- Annual production: 350,000 bottles; 80% exported
- Farming: Untrellised bush vines, no soil tilling, native ground cover, compost
- Cellar: Spontaneous fermentation, no fining or filtration, minimal sulfites
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
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.
Soil And Site
The vineyards are planted on rocky, stony soils with a limestone base and varying levels of clay. The combination drains well, keeps vine stress moderate through the dry summers, and holds enough mineral character to come through in the wine's acidity and texture. Garnacha grown on limestone tends toward bright red fruit and a lifted, aromatic profile rather than the jammy concentration that heavier clay soils can produce.
The Pontigos parcel is the estate's most significant holding. It carries pre-phylloxera Garnacha vines, meaning the root systems are original ungrafted stock from before the late nineteenth-century epidemic that forced European viticulture to graft onto American rootstocks. These vines are farmed without trellising, grow as individual bush-trained plants, and yield less fruit per vine. The concentration that results is different from what young, high-yielding vines produce, and the deep root penetration into limestone subsoil adds a mineral quality to the fruit.
Story
Antonio Sanz founded Vinícola Corellana in Corella in 1989. The operation was built for volume: approximately two million bottles annually, sold in bulk or under generic labels, with no particular ambition toward terroir expression or native variety work.
When his three sons joined in 2007, the direction changed completely. The brothers brought in Garnacha specialist and winemaker Jorge Navascués from neighboring Aragón as a consultant, began conducting microvinifications to map their specific parcels, and started recovering old Garnacha vineyards that had been undervalued in the region. They also acquired new plots at Las Roscas and Lerga to extend their range of vineyard material. The estate's total production fell from millions of bottles to 350,000. The name became Viña Zorzal.
The philosophy that emerged from that pivot placed native varieties, old bush vines, and minimal intervention at the center of every decision. The Graciano they bottled from the 2007 vintage, the first year of the transition, announced the approach plainly: a grape almost nobody was bottling alone in Navarra, chosen precisely because it expressed the region's native character without compromise.
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.
In the cellar, fermentations run on native yeasts without inoculation. Racking is minimized to protect the wine from oxidation and preserve aromatic freshness. Nothing is filtered or fined before bottling, and sulfites are used only in very small doses. The approach keeps the wine's texture open, its fruit clear, and its profile close to what the limestone and the climate produced in that particular year.
Wines
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.
Tempranillo and Mazuelo complete the red plantings. Mazuelo, known as Carignan in France and Cariñena in Catalonia, has deep roots in Navarra's history and is among the varieties the brothers are developing on their more recently acquired plots at Las Roscas and Lerga. White varieties are also grown on the estate, though the white range is smaller and less documented than the reds.
Microvinifications from individual parcels inform ongoing cellar decisions and may produce small-batch wines as the estate's parcel knowledge deepens.
In The Glass
The Garnacha comes up from the glass with fresh red cherries, a flicker of plum, and a distinct note of ginger that sharpens the fruit rather than softening it. There is a peppery edge that Garnacha grown on limestone at elevation carries as a kind of signature. In the mouth the wine is sappy and light, with a silky texture that comes from the old bush vines producing low yields of ripe, evenly concentrated fruit. The acidity is genuine and present, long enough to make the wine feel alive on the finish rather than settled. The minimal-intervention cellar work keeps the aromatics clean and the fruit direct: no oak character, no grip from extraction, nothing that competes with what the Fitero foothills put into the grape.
The Graciano sits in a different register, darker and firmer, with more tannic weight and a longer finish driven by acid rather than sweetness.
A Bottle To Understand It
Start with the estate Garnacha from Corella. It is a red wine made entirely from old, untrellised Garnacha bush vines on rocky limestone in the Fitero foothills, fermented on native yeasts, unfined and unfiltered, with minimal sulfites. The color is light. The fruit is immediate: red cherry, a strand of plum, ginger, and pepper. The texture is silky and the finish is clean and acid-driven without any harsh edges. It is the clearest single bottle for understanding what the limestone, the continental climate, and the bush-vine farming together produce, and it shows the freshness of Fitero.
Anecdote
In 2007, the three Sanz brothers joined their father's winery in Corella and immediately faced a choice: carry on producing two million bottles of bulk wine annually, or start from the beginning with something that had their names on it. They stopped scaling. The first wine they chose to release under the new Zorzal label was a single-variety Graciano, a late-ripening, high-acid grape that almost every other producer in Navarra used only in blends, or ignored entirely. Nobody in the trade was asking for solo Graciano from southern Navarra. The brothers bottled it anyway, because it was native, because it was demanding, and because it was the opposite of everything their father's operation had been built to do. They named the estate after the thrush, a bird that sings louder than its size suggests, and put it on the label.
Final Word
Viña Zorzal is a Garnacha estate built on a decision to go smaller. The Fitero foothills give the wines a freshness that the broader Ribera Baja region does not always offer, the pre-phylloxera vines at Pontigos add depth to the old-vine material, and the cellar keeps everything direct and clear. The estate Garnacha is the bottle to open first.
Sources
- https://wineanorak.com/2025/01/13/vina-zorzal-expressive-naturally-made-wines-from-navarra-spain/
- https://spanishwinelover.com/winerie/vina-zorzal