Among the first wave of new grapes that came to define today’s era of diversity in wine was albariño, from the Rías Baixas region of Galicia in northwestern Spain.

The wines were a novelty when they began showing up in Spanish restaurants in the United States in the early 1990s. The occasional mentions of them through the decade required pronunciation guides: al-bar-EEN-yo and REE-yas BUY-shas. In 1995, Frank J. Prial, then The New York Times’s wine columnist, cautioned, “Albariño is not an easy wine to find in this country.”

In short time, though, it caught on, and helped pave the way for other then-unknown white wines to be welcomed onto the country’s wine list, like grüner veltliner of Austria, fiano d’Avellino of Campania and assyrtiko of Santorini, as well as other Spanish whites like godello.

While albariño has proved consistently popular since then, it has rarely received much respect from those looking beyond crisp, cheerful (and preferably inexpensive) whites.