I’m late to my interview with Luis Anxo.
I’ve been filming a video about the medieval terraces of Val do Avia with my friend Antonio Míguez Amil, and between having to take it easy on the gas pedal while driving up the serpentine roads that lead to Antonio’s vineyard, shooting the video, and catching up about life (I haven’t seen Antonio for a year), we’re running late.
So I call Luis Anxo. “No problem! I’m at the optometrist!” he booms in rapid-fire Galician. “Come by when you’re done and we’ll go to the winery!”
We arrive at the optometrist (easy to find, because there’s only one in Ribadavia, population 5,003) and find the man himself, chatting with the staff. Everyone knows each other here. After some preliminary greetings and introductions, we’re off to the winery: Luis Anxo in his van, my girlfriend and me following behind him in our rental car. We cross the Avia River and follow the road south to Arnoia (population 1,015). It’s a beautiful June afternoon, and we take in the vines that line both sides of the road and stretch upwards on terraced slopes. I get yelled at because I’m taking the curves too fast. About 10 minutes later, we pull up to the winery. It’s a small, unassuming building on a tiny road that juts off from the OU-402. Typical Galician construction, built from the massive blocks of granite sitting on the hills surrounding Arnoia.
In an alternate universe, this building and the family vines would have been been sold off years ago and no one would ever have heard of Luis Anxo Rodríguez, who could be found working in a cushy lawyer’s office in Ourense. Luckily for us, he felt the pull of his roots. After a childhood spent helping in the family winery, he went to school for law, but later changed to philosophy, and then studied oenology in Madrid. In 1986, “Viña de Martín” was born. As he puts it, “you have to devote your life to something,” so he chose the family business.
“You started to see what your parents were making: they were cheap wines, uninteresting, without any prestige, and that meant you couldn’t make a living from this, because you had to make large amounts of wine. It was an economic activity without a future.”
Nearly forty years later, the wines have become symbols of a modern Ribeiro—a region that was built on wines made from traditional grapes thanks in no small part to the work of Luis Anxo, who has achieved mononym status among those in the Galician wine industry. You don’t need to specify “Rodríguez Vázquez,” because there’s only one Luis Anxo.
Despite his fame both in Spain and abroad, he maintains a sort of bewildered air throughout our interview like he can’t believe that this American has come all the way to Arnoia to talk to him about his wine. He’s not putting me on, either: when I ask him whether he considers himself a pioneering winemaker, he can’t even be bothered with entertaining the suggestion. The closest he comes to taking any credit is admitting that he was one of the first to work with traditional varieties, along with “just a handful” of others in the ’90s.
He credits a “cultural maturation” for the sea change that took place in Ribeiro: “You started to see what your parents were making: they were cheap wines, uninteresting, without any prestige, and that meant you couldn’t make a living from this, because you had to make large amounts of wine. It was an economic activity without a future.”
This cultural maturation might not have taken place a decade earlier. In 1976, generalísimo Francisco Franco was at death’s door, but his regime still held sway over an economically crippled country. His death that year unleashed a decade of change unlike the country had ever seen: in politics, culture, and the economy. When Luis Anxo planted his first vines in 1984, modern Spanish democracy was only six years old and talks were already under way for Spain to join the European Union. Economic expansion was on the horizon, and consumers were ready for higher-quality products—including wine.
That’s not to say that change happened overnight. As Luis Anxo recounts, “we had to confront everyone: our parents, our grandparents, our neighbors, the whole world. Because people instinctively wanted to continue doing what they were doing—even if it wasn’t profitable—because they had always been doing that. And to give that up, to plant something that, even though it was “ours,” had a very uncertain future, there were all these factors making sure no one encouraged you to follow that path. So for me, just like for the others who started when I did or a little bit before I did, it was a process of cultural maturation. You realized that if we did things better, if we used the varieties we knew were good like treixadura, godello, torrontés, and lado, if we managed to make a quality wine, there would be a future for this area. Because a market for it was beginning to emerge: a clientele, consumers who asked for that more and more every day.”
It’s a long interview. We talk more about the past, but I’m left with what he has to say about the present. Fast forward to today, and Luis Anxo’s wines have put Ribeiro on top wine lists in world capitals and given him a cult following among consumers in the know. I ask him if he thinks Galician wines are undervalued. The answer is a resounding no. We have to contextualize, he says.
“You have to think that in Galicia, people have made wine for a long time, but they were wines for self-consumption, wines that had no great commercial value,” he tells me. “It’s improved a lot in the last twenty or thirty years, and we’re meeting with recognition that’s appropriate given the effort that’s been made and with the quality that these wineries are achieving. But you have to recognize that in the recent past they made really bad wines here. Really bad.”
This goes against the grain of what many young Galicians (and I, occasionally) are preaching: that Galician wines can and should compete with some of the best wines available on the market today. Luis Anxo takes a more measured approach. “I think that nowadays we have a level of recognition possibly even higher than we deserve, because in a way we’re fashionable. When you’re in fashion, people like you more than usual,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t go to our heads and that we continue to do things and improve, because there’s a lot to improve, and we’re a long way off from large areas of the world that have been making good wines for years, decades.”
You can watch him say all that in the video above. Off-camera, I ask him about the growing idea to divide Galicia’s wine regions into smaller designations of quality—a sort of “cru” system similar to that recently implemented in Bierzo. He’s not a fan.
Historically, Galicians can’t compare themselves to Burgundy, he tells me. Galicia doesn’t have a centuries-old tradition of uninterrupted quality winemaking, and modern wines of quality in Galicia have been around for thirty or forty years at most. It’s interesting to see what people are doing, he says, but that doesn’t give them the right to suddenly give a parcel Grand Cru status. Wait and see if it makes good wine in fifty or one hundred years. But like any good Galician, holding his cards close to his chest, he gives me a mischeivous look, saying “but of course that’s just one way of thinking about it. It depends on who you ask.
