Wine romp through Rías Baixas in Galicia, Spain – Part One

Mel

4 years ago

This month the #worldwinetravel group is exploring Rías Baixas, home of the beloved white wine albariño. If you love refreshing, high-acidity white wines, you’ll want to keep reading.

Green Spain & Galicia

Galicia is located in the northwest corner of Spain and is perhaps best known for its capital, Santiago de Compostela, the final destination of the Camino de Santiago, one of the greatest pilgrimages in the world.

Being a coastal area, Galicia boasts 1,498 km of coastline and over 700 beaches, and you can bet that seafood plays a major role in the region’s cuisine (we’ll come back to that later). Galicia is also part of an area dubbed “Green Spain” which covers a strip along Northern Spain from the Atlantic coast to the border with France. It owes its colourful name to the lush vegetation resulting from its wet, temperate oceanic climate.

With such a perfect climate for growing, it stands to reason that grapes also do well here. Galicia’s grape-growing region is called Rías Baixas (pronounced ree-as by-shas). The name means “lower estuaries” in the Galician language, because the area is made up of a series of estuarine inlets, little fingers of tidal wetlands that curve into the land.

Rías Baixas

Rías Baixas is a small wine-growing region famous for its crisp white wines. This figures, since only 1% of grapes planted here are red, so good luck finding a red wine from this wine region.

As we’ve mentioned, this area is known for its rainfall (Green Spain, remember). Rías Baixas gets showered with 1700 mm of annual rainfall, about three times the Spanish national average. As a result, vineyard mildew can be a problem. That’s why vines are trained on overhead pergolas 5-7 ft above ground called “parras”. This gives the canopy lots of exposure to sunshine while protecting the grapes from rain and letting the breeze get right underneath the vines for aeration. So it’s surprising that grapes are generally hand-harvested here. Harvesting is already back-breaking work, but when you’re working overhead, that just adds a whole new level to harvester aches and pains. Pass the aspirin!

Rías Baixas parras (source: *Rías Baixas* virtual trip)

Albariño

Rías Baixas is synonymous with albariño. This thick-skinned white grape accounts for a whopping 96% of all plantings in this region, and has been grown here for over 1000 years. This star grape is so important to the region that it even has its own annual festival the first week of August, in the town of Cambados.

In 1980, the grape became protected under the appellation Denominación Específica Albariño. After Spain joined the EU, which recognized wine-producing areas rather than specific products, the Denominación de Origen Rías Baixas was approved in 1988, protecting the quality of wines made in the region using native permitted grape varieties.

The area’s temperate climate is perfect for growing albariño – its average annual temperature is a mere 13°C, which helps maintain the grape’s racy acidity.

Albariño is also grown in Portugal, which is separated from Galicia only by the narrow Miño River. In Portugal, it is known as alvarinho, and is a key grape in Vinho Verde, but the two are definitely the same grape.

Albariño is incredibly versatile and can be the subject of many different winemaking styles, including aging in stainless steel tanks or barrels, or even in a sparkling style. The grape has delightful floral aromas, and stonefruit and grapefruit flavours.

Are you intrigued yet? Next week I’ll be taking a virtual trip to Rías Baixas. Stay tuned for tastings of three different albariños from Rías Baixas in Part 2!