Everyone wants a piece of Rías Baixas. This rainy corner of Galicia, its jagged granite coastline sculpted by the Atlantic, has the most sought-after, and expensive, vineland in Spain. Some of the country’s biggest producers – Vega Sicilia, Cune, Ramon Bilbao, La Rioja Alta – have been snapping up parcels of land. In 2022, Vega Sicilia announced a €20m investment in 24ha of vineyard; last year Cune bought a bodega called La Val, along with 100ha of vineyard. This interest in the region has forced up prices: in the O Rosal subzone, the best land can go for €200,000 a hectare – that’s about ten times the value of Ribera del Duero to the east.
Albariño is the great draw and its possibilities are only beginning to be understood. Although (according to some origin stories) its history in Galicia goes back a thousand years, in practical terms it was disregarded a generation ago. When José Barros of Maior de Mendoza planted 10 hectares in the Salnés subzone in 1976, ‘it was the biggest Albariño vineyard in the world. Everyone thought we were crazy,’ his son Marcos, the winery’s managing director, says.
Depending on terroir and vinification, Albariño can be delicately textured and aromatic or opulent, tannic and briskly saline
Albariño thrives in Rías Baixas. It makes up 95% of the output of the 169 bodegas here. Depending on terroir and vinification, it can be delicately textured and aromatic or opulent, tannic and briskly saline. At times I was reminded of Santorini Assyrtiko, another wine informed by the sea and the wind (so important is the latter in Rías Baixas one bodega calls its top cuvée Veigadares meaning ‘the land of the wind’ in Galician).
Above all, there’s the rain. Average rainfall in Galicia is 1,300mm per year (Cardiff, Britain’s wettest city, gets just over 1,000mm). In Salnés, responsible for half the wines of the region and some 70% of the growers, ‘we get 2,000mm of rain,’ Diego Rios says with some pride.
Rios is head winemaker at Bodegas Granbazán, a producer which in some ways exemplifies modern Rías Baixas. Established in 1981 and one of the founder wineries of the appellation, it was taken over by the group which owns Bodegas Baigorri in Rioja in 2017. They are investing in new smaller tanks in the chai (the smallest will be 2,600l) to enable a more parcellaire approach in the vineyards. ‘Rías Baixas has had a very new-world mindset,’ Rios – who is Chilean and has worked in Germany – says. ‘We need to find a more old-world identity’.
It’s the pleasing paradox of wine today: the old-world mindset (small and artisan) is the modern way. But you need to have a healthy bank balance by today’s standards to do it. Cune owner Victor Urrutia points out that there are 5,000 growers in Rías Baixas farming tiny plots. Bodegas work with multiple different smallholders, which can make it difficult to understand the terroir. Owning 100ha, he told me over the phone, they have the control to explore the character of different plots and ‘find the essence of Albariño. At La Val – like Granbazán – Cune is installing small vats and making single vineyard wines.
Producers here love the vagaries of their terroir. Alberto Cábaco Mariño made his fortune in frozen fish and bought a hill in O Rosal in the south, overlooking the Río Miño on the Portuguese border. He planted eight hectares and called his project Pentecostés. His vineyards neatly encircle the top of a rise. The terraces, facing five different ways (he reckons on two to three weeks’ difference in ripeness between plots that are mere metres from each other) are surrounded by houses and smallholdings, their gardens shaded with trees. Two thirds of the vines are Albariño, with the remaining third the local Loureiro, Treixadura, Caiño and Godello. Cábaco Mariño, an unassuming figure, was born here and feels a deep affiliation with the land and the centuries of winemaking that preceded his stewardship. ‘The land remembers,’ he murmurs, puffing on a cigarette.
His wines have extraordinary weight and freshness and the saline heft that is the hallmark of these Atlantic-influenced vineyards. It’s their high acidity (they can reach 10gsl compared to the 6-7gsl average in this part of Spain) that convinces me they will last. There’s a similar salinity in the wines produced by the ebullient former TV journalist Roque Durán, who founded Terra de Asorei in Salnés in 2008. ‘It’s the sea mists that affect the skins of the grape,’ he says of his Nai e Señora Albariño, which comes from a vineyard a kilometre from the Ría de Arousa, one of the five deep estuaries that form the dramatic coastline of the Rías Baixas.
Some of the most compelling aged Albariños sit on their lees for months. Fefiñanes in Pontevedra achieves a dense, textured salinity (it was they that put me in mind of Santorini’s Assyrtikos) from five months on lees, stirred twice a week, then 2.5 years in stainless steel. Cuvées like the 2013 Armas de Lanzas are still briskly acidic. At the ultra-modern Altos de Torona in Rosal, winemaker Miguel Estevez’ beautifully textured Albariño spends six months on the lees. At Asorei, Roque Durán has a complex system whereby he shifts lees between tanks to add to the concentration. ‘I choose the lees which smell the best,’ he says.
Some producers worry that the arrival of big companies will upset a delicate balance
‘All our wines are designed to have long ageing potential,’ notes Maria Otero at Adegas Galegas in the far south. ‘Rías Baixas should be the white Burgundy of Albariño’. At this bodega, whose trellised vines are a stone’s throw from the border, winemaker Juan Posada ferments in oak: ‘A lot of people think that’s mad but Albariño is big and powerful enough to cope with it’. The Veigadares, a blend of Albariño with Treixadura, Loureira and Caiño, has orange flowers, spice and honeysuckle flavours. My notes say, ‘Southern Rhône vibe without the opulence. Fascinating but a bit out there.’
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Quite the contrary – a willingness to be ‘out there’ can be the hallmark of exciting winemaking. At the same time, producers are very much aware that they are working within a long and honourable tradition, and some worry that the arrival of big companies will upset a delicate balance. Will they preserve the granite-supported pergola trellising systems, for example, with their generous spacing designed to aerate vines in the damp climate? As land gets more expensive ‘the big guys want to plant more rows but then the wind won’t dry the vines and you have to use chemicals to control disease,’ Barros says. Still, he and other producers welcome the investment. ‘Vega Sicilia coming here is a happy moment for us,’ one producer told me. ‘They’ll make a good wine and sell it for a good price’.
Vega’s owner Pablo Alvarez said it had long been his family’s dream to come to Rías Baixas, “a historic and very singular region.” I remember those words as I stand on the verandah of the grand old manor house at Granbazán, looking at the vineyards in the steadily-falling spring rain. I’d swear the vines are getting greener before my eyes. As each leaf bounces under the raindrops, the canopy seems to tremble with life. I agree with Alvarez: there’s something ancient and elemental in this damp and windy corner of Spain. No wonder everyone’s beating a path here.
