Harvest 2024 is all but completed in Galicia, and all signs point to a great year for quality. Though the amount of grapes harvested was slightly lower than in 2023, good weather conditions throughout the growing season allowed for a slow and complete ripening, which points to a potentially great vintage.
Valdeorras kicked things off on August 21 and brought in a record 8.2 million kilos of grapes. The majority of the harvest was Godello, the region’s star variety. Technical Director Jorge Mazaira says that the region is showing “an increasingly specialized dedication” to this grape, and that the DO has added about 50 ha of vineyards planted to Godello.
Lest we forget that Valdeorras doesn’t have exclusive claim to the up-and-coming grape (despite what their new “GODELLO IS FROM VALDEORRAS” campaign would have us believe), it’s worth noting that Godello also made up the majority of the grapes harvested in Monterrei—a region which has battled Valdeorras to lay claim to the variety. Earlier this summer, Galicia’s smallest DO courted controversy when it put up a billboard reading “The King of Godello: Monterrei” on the highway that runs past DO Valdeorras headquarters—just feet away from the Valdeorras regulatory council’s official “Godello is from Valdeorras” sign.
Galicia’s smallest wine region brought in its largest harvest to date, with 7.69 million kilos of grapes and a 70-30 split between white and red grapes. Monterrei president Jonatas Gago says 2024 was “one of the best in terms of grape health, with favorable weather conditions throughout the growth cycle that allowed us to obtain excellent quality fruit.” Monterrei has also expanded this year, increasing its registered vineyard area by 75 hectares.
In Galicia’s most well-known white wine region, the year got off to a complicated start due to a rainy spring. Rías Baixas Technical Director Agustín Lago considers the vintage to be “very good or excellent”, citing good weather over the summer, which stuck around during the harvest itself. All told, Galicia’s most famous region collected 42.14 million kilos of grapes, 95% of which were Albariño.
Ribeira Sacra saw a significant drop in quantity harvested from 2023, and this year is the first time in a decade that production has dipped below 5 million kilos. Most of that variation has to do with the shadow of crisis hanging over the region: in September, the Galician regional government authorized crisis distillation in the DO, a measure aimed at withdrawing wine from the market to balance supply and demand. Despite this, Antonio Lombardía, president of D.O. Ribeira Sacra, says that 2024 has the potential to be an excellent vintage. Lombardía has high hopes for the region: “I think our strength is the uniqueness of our viticulture, our varieties and our wines,” he said. “The challenge is to reorient the DO to medium- and high-end wines to be able to maintain a form of growing grapes which, due to its uniqueness, is also very expensive.”
In Ribeiro, DO president Concha Iglesias said that 2024 was “a good harvest, similar to last year’s in quantity, although the quality is much better.” Production was around eleven million kilos.