Miguel Crunia is a sommelier and founder of Edinburgh-based importer and online wine shop Fìon. He’s also a proud Gallego. His group ‘Grupo Orixe’ is advocating for a more terroir-based understanding of Galician wines, and even pushing for a new pyramid of quality based on villages and historic vineyards. We sat down to talk about the challenges of selling Galicia, how he tries to represent smaller wineries, and his vision for the Galicia of tomorrow.
A condensed version of our interview is below.
[In the UK] a lot of people talk about how you see albariño in Tesco right? So that’s kind of the quality that we’re seeing the level of volume that’s being produced. Do you think that people seek out higher quality artisan wines from Galicia as well in Scotland?
You have two very different types of consumers. Until not that long ago the UK depended on importing wine from all over the world. People who like wine tend to be quite educated customers. Yes, it’s very difficult to take them away from their classic Italy or classic France but they also like to discover wines. Then you have the day-to-day consumer who normally is oriented by the price point of a bottle of wine when they go to the supermarket. And that’s some educational task that we have on our shoulders, you know because when you go to Tesco, for example, or Sainsbury’s, and you take a bottle of wine, you see these weird labels. What is this, “El Camarón Albariño”? And you turn them around and you see that bottle of wine hasn’t been made by a winery. And people don’t really care about that.
But some people would say that that’s a market niche itself, right?
I don’t deny the fact that the denominations and big brands actually did all the dirty jobs, especially because they are the ones that have the capability to invest money in marketing in the supermarkets, and that’s the very first barrier to knock down—people looking at a label of Albariño or Treixadura and saying like, “What is this? Let me try it,” and then if they like it, to move on. What cannot happen is that all the efforts in terms of communication and marketing only go towards that side. Because talking about the UK market, I think that Galician wines are a really well-established reality. You can see them in all the supermarkets, in all the big volume retailers, but also on the best wine lists in the country. And it’s not only Rías Baixas, but you can start seeing Monterrei, you can see Ribeira Sacra… So now is the time to open a second way which is like, okay, obviously there are people who still need to do the dirty work, because that’s going to be beneficial, but we need to realize that the quality of a region is just sustained by 10% of wines or even less, which is more the artisanal, terroir-driven labels that are out there. Especially if we want to establish ourselves as one of the classic regions of tomorrow.
So you are part of an initiative called Grupo Orixe. Explain a little bit what is Grupo Orixe and what is the mission?
So Grupo Orixe is an association of of individuals born out of a frustration, because we saw that the denominations of origin only push a certain type of message. So as a reaction to that we decided to create this cultural group. We don’t want to be anything bureaucratic, we don’t want to start a a war, but from the places where we work we want to start communicating Galicia in a different way.
And one of the things that you’re pushing for is more zonification of Galicia.
Galicia needs zonification because otherwise we are going to eradicate all of our cultural history. You can see that now: all the messages are Ribeiro equals Treixadura, you know? For me Ribeiro is a more complex reality, which is all about that viticultural polygamy with many varieties planted together. It’s all about minifundios, smallholdings. It’s not only albariño, but it’s espadeiro and caíño. We see that zonification is possible because we have the the big components, which are mostly minifundios, really old vineyards, we can study the soils, and many people already studied the soils, so it’s like why are we being so lazy that we are not putting this together? I mean look at Bierzo, look at Priorat. They’ve done it, it’s difficult, it will take a lot of time, but why is it not happening?
Some people might push back and say Galicia is a very young wine region, right? How do you kind of balance between the idea of historical vineyards and classifications and the DO system that really has only existed for 45 years?
If we were pushing bureaucratically that obviously needs proper study, taking geologists to study the soils, to certify the age of the vineyard and and all these parameters, but in a communicative way it’s just based on on trust. I think we feel a duty to start telling this to the world.
So what you’re doing then is a storytelling initiative, more so than a bureaucratic one.
Exactly.
What is your utopian vision 20, 25, 30 years in the future for Galicia?
So I still envision the big wineries of course. I’m not denying that we need those because as I said they do the dirty job. So we still need those supermarket wines, but I would love to see Galicia—and I think we will achieve it if we push in the right direction of zonification—competing face to face with Burgundy. So I think for example the the message that we want to send is that we need to be flexible. We are stuck in the past. The regulations that we had in the DOs are from back in the ‘90s and those regulations did actually make sense back then. But now we are in a time where the new generations are pushing toward showing that terroir-driven wines can be done. Now we need to broaden our regulations to be more inclusive of those wines.