Galician Wines You Should Be Drinking: Guímaro

I’m not one to generally brag about my blind tasting abilities.

I have a lot of respect for those who can consistently do it and I’d like to think that I’m not half bad at it, but I’m not about to enter any competition. This is probably because my approach to blind tasting doesn’t hinge on a deductive method of associating aromas and flavors with a certain part of the world, but rather with sense-memories stored in my brain that are more emotional than chemical. My method doesn’t work for every wine, but when it does, it works well.

When I lived in Logroño, in La Rioja, I used to give English classes out of a wine shop. One day I arrived and my friend who worked there had a blind for me. I took a look at the glass, put it up to my nose, and… “Mencía! Ribeira Sacra!”.

“How did you do that?” she asked me incredulously. To be honest, I really didn’t know how I did it. I just… knew. To paraphrase Wallace Shawn, “Never go in against a (wannabe) Galician when Mencía is on the line!”

The wine? Adegas Guímaro Mencía.

Photo by José Pastor Selections

All of that is to say that if there’s a typicity to Ribeira Sacra, Guímaro is one of the wineries that nails it. It’s no surprise—it’s also one of the wineries that helped define it. Guímaro, which means rebel in Galician, is run by Pedro Rodríguez, whose family helped found the Ribeira Sacra appellation in 1996. Pedro took over in 2001, and with the help of Raúl Pérez gradually incorporated more sophisticated techniques such as whole-bunch fermentation and the use of different materials like large foudres for aging. He now makes single-vineyard reds as well as the young red and white wines his family started with.

Guímaro Mencía is a village wine from a mix of vineyards around the Amandi subzone planted on gneiss and slate soils. It’s mostly Mencía, with small amounts of other traditional varieties like Brancellao and Merenzao. Grapes are hand-harvested and fermented in stainless steel with native yeasts, where the wine rests for 8 months before being bottled.

What you get is a medium-bodied red with super bright acidity with crushed stone, wild berries, and maybe a bit of smoke on the nose. On the palate a lot of juicy fruit like wild raspberries with that distinctive mineral dryness.

Happy drinking, and saúde!