On May 3, Juan Manuel Casares Gándara announced that he was stepping down as president of DO Ribeiro‘s regulatory council, a position he had held since 2017, to head to the Galician parliament. He was an alternate on the center-right Popular Party (PP) ticket, and after post-election political shuffling, he was called up to take his place in Santiago de Compostela. Casares isn’t the first president of Ribeiro to move into a career in politics: his predecessor assumed the position upon the resignation of Miguel Ángel Viso, who went to the Spanish parliament for the PP.
Casares is also no stranger to playing politics. He weathered conflicts between the wine region’s different squabbling factions over seven mostly stable years without much internal drama. He’s a likable guy, with a politician’s personality: charming, happy to answer questions, but hardens when pressed on the issues. He calls himself a Galeguista, someone who is invested in promoting Galicia. He even speaks Galician in public (something rare for a member of the PP, under whose government use of the Galician language has bottomed out).
But as a leader, his presidency embodied several worrying trends, all of which can be traced back to the lobbying of larger wineries: an increase in the promotion of single-variety Treixadura wines over the region’s traditional blends, higher yields, and what Casares called the “resizing” of the DO (read: new plantations and expansion into places where growing grapes on the macro scale becomes more profitable instead of recovering the hundreds of hectares of traditional terraces that characterize the region).
Playing politics has its price, and Ribeiro is paying it. Whoever takes over for Casares will inherit a rudderless wine region, trying and failing to emulate the success of Rías Baixas through senseless promotional campaigns. Ribeiro is saddled with an aging base of growers, an ever-increasing population drain, and growing ideological conflicts between colleiteiros and larger producers.
Playing politics has its price, and Ribeiro is paying it. Whoever takes over for Casares will inherit a rudderless wine region, trying and failing to emulate the success of Rías Baixas through senseless promotional campaigns. Ribeiro is saddled with an aging base of growers, an ever-increasing population drain, and growing ideological conflicts between colleiteiros (small-scale artisan producers, more on colleiteiros here) and larger producers.
A source from the Asociación de Colleiteiros says they saw the resignation coming. “As long as the position of President of the Regulatory Council is used as a springboard for a career in politics, Ribeiro will live in a permanent limbo,” the person I spoke to said.
The conflicts have been going on for a while now. In 2021, seventeen of these colleiteiros sued the Regulatory Council, accusing it of unjustly charging different prices for DO Ribeiro official seals—with a higher price to certify wines made with native varieties like treixadura, godello, and albariño, and a lower price for wines made with “outside” varieties like palomino. A judge determined that the vote to adopt the price change unjustly favored large wineries—who have the most votes on the Regulatory Council—and worked against colleiteiros and smaller wineries, who are the ones making the most wine from indigenous grapes.
Casares left a power vacuum temporarily filled by Concha Iglesias Pousas—vice president of Viña Costeira, Ribeiro’s largest winery. Her appointment is provisional and will last for a month. After that, the Regulatory Council will decide whether to elect Iglesias as the official president or choose another candidate.
By all accounts, Ribeiro’s next president will be more of the same: someone loyal to the PP, the party founded in 1981 by former Franco minister Manuel Fraga that has held power mostly uninterrupted in Galicia ever since, and someone prepared to represent the interests of large wineries that make up most of the voting members of Ribeiro’s Regulatory Council.
But the colleiteiros propose a different path. “We have to do some reflecting and fill this position with someone who’s not in politics, who knows Ribeiro and the wine sector well,” said the colleiteiro I spoke to. “Positioning Ribeiro as a reference point for quality in Galicia, in the rest of Spain, and globally, requires classifying and recovering the land. It requires us to value our history and intelligently communicate our values and our diversity. We need someone who brings knowledge, management skills, and sensitivity. What we don’t need is someone who will serve themselves in exchange for putting themselves at the service of specific interests.”