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“With the economy, nobody’s drinking wine in Spain,” said Kerin Auth, an owner of Tinto Fino, a shop in the East Village that specializes in Spanish wines. “It’s all cocktails.”

Perhaps she’s overstating it — the Spanish are not yet accompanying their steak or sea bream with gin and tonics, as one friend in Madrid told me — but wine consumption there has nonetheless diminished.

It’s just one more burden in what has been more than a century of disasters for Spanish wine: phylloxera, civil war, two world wars, dictatorship and now rampant unemployment and the prospect of an economic collapse. Yet the rejuvenation of the Spanish wine industry that began in earnest after Franco continues. Agriculture perseveres, regardless of fad, fashion and even economic setbacks.

A case in point is godello, a white grape that at one time was popular in parts of Galicia, in northwestern Spain. By the 1970s, much of it had been torn out in favor of palomino, a more prolific grape that is wonderful in Andalusia when made into sherry but is largely mediocre elsewhere as a still white wine.

Perhaps inspired by the commercial success of albariño in the western Galician region of Rías Baixas, researchers in the late 1970s began working with godello in Valdeorras, in eastern Galicia. One of the earliest and best of the modern godello producers, Godeval, was founded in 1986.

Since then, godello has grown steadily more popular. Now, many producers are making the wine, largely in Valdeorras but also in other regions of eastern Galicia, including Monterrei and Ribeira Sacra, and the adjacent region of Bierzo in Castilla y Léon.

The wines, sometimes made solely of godello, other times blended with local grapes like treixadura and albariño, remind me of chardonnay, at least in the sense that the godello grape is versatile and somewhat neutral, greatly reflecting in its aromas and flavors the methods of the winemaker. What’s less clear is whether godello, like chardonnay, excels at conveying subtle but profound differences in terroir, that scary French word that simply refers to the specific combinations of soil, climate, altitude and exposition that characterize the site in which the grapes are grown, along with the human involvement.

Some people have already made up their minds about godello. Gerry Dawes, who has been writing about Spanish wines for decades and who recently went into the importing business, has called godello “Spain’s emerging hope as an equivalent to the great white Burgundies.” Others aren’t so sure.

To assess godello for ourselves, the wine panel tasted 20 bottles from recent vintages, including 11 from Valdeorras and 3 each from Bierzo, Monterrei and Ribeira Sacra. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Kerin of Tinto Fino and Michael Madrigale, the head sommelier at Bar Boulud and Boulud Sud.

Michael, it is safe to say, was far more familiar with white Burgundy than with godello, and he was not buying Mr. Dawes’s comparison, at least not yet. He said he often found the wines confusing, as if the aromas were telling one story and the flavors another.

“I didn’t get a clear message from the wines,” he said. Florence largely agreed with him.

I didn’t see this so much as a legitimate criticism of the wines as an affirmation that, even if godello has not yet reached the level of white Burgundy, it makes sense to compare it to chardonnay, the grape of white Burgundy. After all, if you put white Burgundies from Chablis, Corton-Charlemagne, St.-Véran and Meursault together in one tasting, you would have four very different expressions of one grape, and perhaps no clear message.

While the wines certainly reflected the techniques of the producers, Kerin believed strongly that they were equally expressive of their regions and their vintages. Producers in Bierzo, she said, favor aging godello in oak barrels, making richer, fuller wines. The godellos from Valdeorras, she said, tend to be aged in steel tanks, giving them a fresher, livelier quality.

It’s not quite so neat as that, as individual producers have their own ambitions. Our No. 1 wine, the 2010 from A. Coroa in Valdeorras, indeed reflected the regional style described by Kerin. It was clean, fresh and inviting, with deep, rich mineral and fruit flavors that were both ripe and savory and a texture that made you want to keep sipping. This wine did not merely represent potential; it was potential realized.

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