The CorkscrewThe weird hybrid wines that leave even the experts guessing at their origin

A trend of sorts among my fellow sommeliers is sourcing obscure wines and seeing if any­one can figure out what it is they’ve been poured. We have been stumped and surprised by odd – sometimes weird – bottles of wine.

We drop hints as to the wine’s origin, with comments such as, “Can’t you smell the flowers? There are ginger flowers, hibiscus blossoms and white roses,” or, “If it’s old world, don’t you think it could be a little bit south of the Colares?”, or even “Not even close, try further east of Budapest.”

These bottles are not always expensive, but they are rare in the sense that they’re usually brought back from a trip abroad or, more often these days in Hong Kong, found in some tucked-away wine shop.

Most confusing to even experienced tasters are wines made from hybrid grapes. Usually, the result is some­thing that tastes familiar but with the palate-confusing flavours of both types of parent grape in the glass.

Baco noir is one such hybrid red-wine grape. It is a cross between folle blanche and an unknown variety of a North American wild indigenous grape.The hybrid is named after François Baco, who came up with the cross in 1898, when he was experimenting with viticultural techniques in southwest France, to see if he could find a “cure” for phylloxera.

What does baco noir taste like? It’s similar to pinot noir, with its dark cherry and sour raspberry fruit, but a meatier version of it, with a gamey edge to the nose – wild duck, a bit of lavender and leather all mixed into a bottle.