Champán Gallego: The Curious History of Galician Sparkling Wine
You may not have tried sparkling wine from Galicia, or even known it existed. But this small, growing category is worth knowing: although Galician sparkling wine has yet to achieve the widespread fame of its counterpart in Cava, with official recognition in the Rías Baixas, Ribeiro, and Valdeorras DOs, it’s attracting attention from curious sommeliers and wine lovers who are ready to have their assumptions about Galicia challenged.
The modern story of Galician sparkling wine is relatively new. In 2009, both Rías Baixas and Valdeorras included sparkling wines in their regulations. Since then, Rías Baixas has grown to produce around 125,000 bottles of the stuff—mostly from Albariño, but also from other authorized white and red grapes—marketed under more than 30 different brands. Ribeiro joined the trend by approving sparkling wines in 2017. All three DOs mandate that sparkling wines are made using the Traditional Method, which involves a second fermentation in the bottle followed by an aging period.
Although official recognition is recent, Galicia has something of a history with sparkling wine. In fact, a hundred years ago, if you were launching a ship or ringing in the New Year, you just might have done it with ‘Champán Galicia’.
Exploding Bottles to Booming Business
The year was 1902. Manuel Costas was a well-to-do landowner from A Ramallosa, a small village in the Val Miñor river valley on Galicia’s southwestern coast where people were probably making white wine with grapes like Albariño, Loureiro, or Caíño. Tired of drinking the same things, he began tinkering with sparkling wine, hoping to emulate the bottles from northern France that had captivated the upper echelons of society. The first year, almost all the bottles exploded. Costas would spend years perfecting his method for making sparkling wine, until finally, at the end of the nineteen-teens, he came up with a winning product.
Manuel Costas
But as a breathless report from the contemporary magazine Vida Gallega puts it: “just as Señor Costas saw his dream of having given Galicia a new industry that would elevate the reputation of its wines fulfilled, he was overwhelmed by the scale of the success. The market responded too well. Orders exceeded the capacity of his winery. Despite all his efforts, he couldn’t keep up with the demand… That’s when Don Manuel Costas’s persistence, vision, and love for his enterprise found the partner it needed to avoid collapse from too much fortune: Don Bautista López Valeiras—a bold and enterprising man, a sharp-minded merchant of high ambition, and, above all, a passionate believer in Galicia’s progress.”
Manuel Costas y Compañía joined forces with Vinícola Gallega, a company based in Vigo and owned by Bautista López Valeiras, a merchant whose family business had been transporting and selling hams, wine, salted fish, eggs—you name it—since the 1700s. The following year, Gran Champán Galicia made its debut.
Gran Champán Galicia ad from Catálogo de Vigo - Vigo a través de un siglo (published 1922)
Costas y Compañía sold their wine in an elegant bottle with a coat of arms on the label that depicted the bridge of A Ramallosa, laurel branches, and a royal crown. Veuve Clicquot who? The wine did well, not just because it must have tasted halfway decent, but also because in 1920s Galicia, finding bottled wine with a label was a luxury.
“Two of the numerous rooms in the wineries where the bottles rest for many months before being released to the market” (Vida Gallega, March 10, 1922)
“Don Manuel Costas, wealthy and passionate creator of Galician Champagne, pictured with one of the teams responsible for disgorging, final corking, and wiring of the bottles — A group of Miñoranos—workers from the wineries.” (Vida Gallega, March 10, 1922)
The press was good: Vida Gallega printed a photographic report of the facilities, calling them “modernisísimo.” An ad in the Catálogo de Vigo, an almanac first published in 1921, bills Gran Champán Galicia as “on sale in restaurants, hotels, and delicatessens—competes with the best foreign brands.” But the success was short-lived. Costas fell ill, and in 1925 the company was dissolved; he would pass away in May 1927.
Champán Wishes and Cava Dreams
Around the same time, brothers Julio and Daniel Vázquez Gulías launched Champagne Gulías, made via the Champenoise Traditional Method from their vineyards in Ribeiro. They managed to place their “Champagne” in the most selective venues in the country, such as the Palace in Madrid—still a five-star hotel owned by Marriott—and the Hotel Washington Irving in Granada—five stars, in the Eurostars portfolio—and they exported to the Galician diaspora in Buenos Aires and Havana. But their fizz fizzled out upon Daniel’s death in 1937.
In 1960, a headline in El Correo Gallego trumpeted: “Galician Champagne Now Has a Champion.” The subject of the coverage was Antonio Ramos Martínez, who owned five wineries in Castrelo de Miño, in Ribeiro, and made a vino achampanado (Champagne-ized wine) from Palomino. Under the Bodegas Ramos brand, he bottled “Champán Semiseco” (semi-dry) and “Champán Semidulce” (semi-sweet) along with an Achampanado Corriente (literally, “commonplace Champagne-style wine”). We don't know how long Ramos’s brush with bubbles lasted, but economic historian Ángel I. Fernández suggests it may have ended when the Castrelo de Miño valley was flooded to make way for a hydroelectric dam in 1968.
Later attempts to start a sparkling wine brand in Ribeiro mostly revolved around linking the wines to other, more successful wine regions. In the early ‘70s, the Cooperativa Vitivinícola of Ribeiro (now Viña Costeira) tried to register a brand called ‘Champeiro’, a portmanteau of ‘Champán’ and ‘Ribeiro’, but was unsuccessful. In the late 1980s, another winery group in Ribeiro tried to register a new business as “Cava do Ribeiro” The name didn’t make it past regulatory scrutiny for obvious reasons, but it did generate buzz. So they thumbed their noses at the regulatory agency and tried again with “C.A.V.A. do Ribeiro”, an acronym for Compañía Abastecedora de Vinos Amparados do Ribeiro. That, too, was rejected. So in 1989, they registered as “Lapatena” and launched the brand “Fin de Siglo” with 160,000 bottles of what their labels called “sparkling wine presented to the market from DO Ribeiro and from Galicia.” That wine disappeared just a few years later, when Lapatena was found to be committing financial and labeling fraud, leading to criminal investigation and arrests.
“more mysterious than a Cava… more enigmatic than a Champagne. Fin de Siglo. It’s party time.”
A Modern Revival
The last decade of the 20th century was a free-for-all of experimentation in Galicia, as producers tried out new winemaking techniques and aging vessels, and pushed the limits of what their appellations allowed. So it was only natural that sparkling wine would make a comeback. In 2006, the Valdeorras winery Día-Noite debuted “Danza”, the first sparkling Godello and the first modern Galician sparkling wine. The same year, María Sineiro of Lagar de Besada made the first sparkling Albariño—a trend that quickly caught on, despite not having official approval yet. Soon powerhouses like Martín Códax and Mar de Frades were coming out with their own sparkling wines. In 2013, the Ribeiro cooperative Viña Costeira introduced the sparkling Treixadura “Lúa Jazz”, although it would be four more years until they could sell the sparkling wine with the DO Ribeiro back-label. Today, nearly thirty wineries produce Galician fizz.
While the sparkling wines of Galicia have had their ups and downs over the last century, today they’re experiencing a genuine wave of appreciation. With growing recognition and more wineries producing traditional method sparkling wines across Rías Baixas, Ribeiro, and Valdeorras, Galician bubbles are finally finding their place.