If it wasn’t for the title of this post, I trust that you’d most likely look at the word “patxaran” and wonder if it wasn’t the name of a pharmaceutical drug or a race of aliens on Star Trek. Sounding the letters out one by one, you suddenly find your tongue confused, unable to maneuver its way to the front of your teeth, then quickly, to the back of your throat in one seamless movement. But rest assured that the phonetics of this word are actually quite simple once you get the hang of the notorious Euskara (native language of Navarra) “tx” sound, pronounced like our “ch”. Hence, Patxaran is phonetically spelled like Pacharán, which is also how it is brilliantly written in Spanish - love the logic of this language!

It wasn’t until our trip to Rioja, and our following visit to Alimentaria, when I truly understood what Patxaran was. Mind you, throughout Rioja, so few people were able to share the history of liquor, shrugging their shoulders in silent ignorance, “It’s a family made drink that people occasionally consumed in their house,” we were told, but we wanted to know more.

What I learned was that Patxaran in Euskara means sloe berry or baso aran (wild plum), a name you might accurately associate with sloe gin. A small dark berry with red juice, a sloe berry comes from a blackthorn bush and is a relative of the plum, while Patxaran is a sloe-flavoured liqueur most commonly drunk in Navarra, the Basque Country and La Rioja.

Historically, Patxaran was used in the middle ages as a remedy for digestive orders. Containing Vitamin C, as well as being a tonic and an astringent, it was thought to strengthen the stomach; …

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