How the white wine boom is transforming Galicia

Madrid and Barcelona have always been left to tourists rather than natives in August, but now that summers are increasingly torrid, more and more Spaniards are heading north rather than south or east for their summer holidays. A prime beneficiary of this is Spain’s wettest, coolest, greenest region, Galicia in the far north-west, which is of increasing interest to wine lovers too.

In recent years, Galicia, four of whose five wine regions produce mainly white wines, has witnessed tangible, bankable proof of the world’s wine drinkers’ switching from reds to whites as several important producers of Spanish red wine have invested there. Three years ago, Tempos Vega Sicilia, producer of the most famous Ribera del Duero red (some 360 miles to the south-east), announced a €20mn investment in not just vineyards but a winery to be ready next year in the leading Galician wine region, Rías Baixas. The Alma Carraovejas group, owners of another highly regarded producer in Ribera del Duero, Pago de Carraovejas, had already acquired Viña Meín in Ribeiro a little further inland in 2019. And the important Rioja producer CVNE acquired La Val in Rías Baixas in 2023, having established its Virgen del Galir operation in Valdeorras, the Galician wine region closest to its base, as long ago as 2002. Pago de los Capellanes of Ribera del Duero established its Valdeorras bodega O Luar do Sil in 2015.

All this external attention has come as a bit of a shock to a part of Spain that always felt a little isolated, and distinctly different from the Spanish mainstream. Admittedly, Albariño has been in vogue for many years. It is the principal grape of Rías Baixas by far. Since the 1990s it has become nearly synonymous with Spanish white wine (and is so much easier for an English speaker to pronounce than Rías Baixas) even if the whites of Rueda posed a more recent challenge. The combination of Albariño’s thick skins and the dramatically indented Atlantic coastline of Rías Baixas, much more rain-lashed than the rest of Spain, has yielded crisp, dry, fruity wines for early consumption that have been much more refreshing than most Spanish whites.

But now there’s a sea change in the style of Albariño from Rías Baixas whereby producers of the top wines seem to be heading in a sort of Chablis direction. They are making more interesting wines: saline, mineral, deep-flavoured wines designed to age are all well worth seeking out. As a sign of the increasing seriousness of the wines, Vega Sicilia’s first vintage 2024 will not be released until 2027. The region has been divided into five subzones, of which Val do Salnés right on the coast is by far the most important, and the wettest.

A characteristic of Galicia in general is that vineyards are tiny and often owned by family members who left the region long ago, so buying land is fraught with difficulty. The 4,640ha of vines in Rías Baixas, for instance, have about 16,000 different owners, many of them scattered around the globe. It took Vega Sicilia four years of negotiation to acquire just 30ha.

The region is divided into 22,500 plots supplying grapes for fewer than 200 wine producers. Every square inch of land must earn its keep. Because granite is so common, many a vine is trained up granite posts with other crops planted below. Of the other Galician wine regions, Ribeiro, Ribeira Sacra and Valdeorras have little more than 1,000ha of vines each, while Monterrei on the Portuguese border has less than 700ha.

The river Miño runs through Ribeiro, a provider of wine to England in the Middle Ages, before forming part of the border between Spain and Portugal. It’s much drier than Rías Baixas and its dry, firm, often more powerful whites, made from much the same grapes as Portugal’s Vinho Verde, are currently enjoying a renaissance which began in the 1970s when Ricardo Carreiro of Coto de Gomariz revived local grape varieties, notably Treixadura. (The sherry grape Palomino was once widely planted in Galicia because it was usefully productive, but its wines were not nearly as distinctive as those based on indigenous grapes and it has largely disappeared.)

Monterrei is well inland with a much more continental climate than the more Atlantic-influenced regions described earlier. Although it’s primarily a small white-wine producer, it can also ripen red-wine grapes, similar to those of Ribeira Sacra to the north, one of the most dramatic wine regions on earth. Largely red-wine vines cling, literally, to the slate slopes of the Sil valley, which can reach gradients of 85 per cent. It’s a miracle that viticulture survives here really. But the likes of Dominio de Bibei and Ponte da Boga show what can be done with the local, fruity Mencía grape (which is also the mainstay of the exciting Bierzo region near the eastern border of Galicia in Castilla y León).

Valdeorras in the extreme south-eastern corner of Galicia, bordered by Bierzo, is also on the Sil. It now has a record of top-quality white-wine production, thanks to its supremely distinguished Godello grape, which was saved from near-extinction in the 1970s by the founder of the Godeval winery. He is seen as the “father of Godello”, though the first wine made exclusively from the grape was launched as recently as the mid-1980s. The grape can make such refined wines, with citrus minerality and impressive structure, that they caught the attention of Spanish winemakers from other regions.

Telmo Rodriguez, who makes fine wine all over Spain, first realised eastern Galicia was a treasure trove of old vines in the 1990s. He laid the foundations of his Ladeiras do Xil Galician operation in 2000 and now owns 25ha of vines in Valdeorras and Ribeira Sacra, nine of them on extremely steep slopes.

Rafael Palacios, younger brother of Álvaro who had already shot to fame for his L’Ermita wine in Priorat in Catalunya, arrived in 2004 and has shown that Valdeorras can produce some of the finest dry whites in the world. His vineyard-specific wines are truly stunning and have the same sort of build as a good Puligny-Montrachet. His vineyards are as high as 700m above sea level, and his prices are steep too — more than £60 for As Sortes, his first single-vineyard bottling.

Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, neither of these talented vintners was included in an initiative organised at the end of last year by local officials to show more than 100 Galician wines (and some spirits and liqueurs) in London. In fact, when I cross-checked the names of participants with those whose wines are favourites with the JancisRobinson.com team, I found only Fillaboa and Quinta Couselo of Rías Baixas and Coto de Gomariz of Ribeiro among those included. Presumably, the exercise was mainly designed to give lesser-known producers, who funded it, a helping hand.

There were a few finds in the tasting, some of them red. But if you’re looking for truly refreshing whites with real character, which may surprise those with memories of heavy Spanish white wines, I can thoroughly recommend those listed here.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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