Rías Baixas’ modern history covers just over 30 years, but people have been making wine here since Roman times. Rías Baixas is practically synonymous with Albariño: a crisp, saline, acidic white wine that pairs with everything that comes from the sea. These days, wine from Rías Baixas is known all over the world, but it wasn’t always that way.
Today, we use “Rías Baixas” as a catch-all term to refer to the geographical area in the south of Pontevedra province. That said, up until the name was given to the wine appellation in 1986, no one would have referred to the winegrowing area of this part of Galicia as “Rías Baixas.” Instead, they used the names that were given to the subzones: Condado de Tea, O Rosal, Salnés, etc.
In 1988, a handful of people tied together three different winemaking areas through the one thing they shared: Albariño. Over the next two decades, they built a brand-new wine region from the ground up, and brought Albariño back from the brink of extinction. The rise of Rías Baixas transformed the grape from an unknown regional curiosity to one of the most—if not the most—recognized white wines from Spain. That’s not all: the Rías Baixas wine appellation created a new identity for the region and gave thousands of people a way to make a dignified living.
The First Vines: Lagares Rupestres and Romans
In 137 BC, the Romans marched into Galicia and added a new province to their empire, naming it Gallaecia. Prior to the Roman invasion, the area’s original inhabitants, a tribe called the Gallaeci, were probably sitting around drinking beer and cider. Archeologists tell us that the very first inhabitants of this corner of the Iberian Peninsula used stone presses to extract fruit juices, which they probably fermented. Sadly, no direct evidence of Gallaecian winemaking exists, but it’s possible they fermented wild grapes too.
As for the Romans, the biggest piece of evidence that they started the tradition of viticulture in the region came to light as recently as 2020. A study published in the Australian Journal for Grape and Wine Research compared ancient Roman grape seeds that turned up in an archeological dig near Vigo, and found that they were extremely similar to modern-day Albariño. So, it stands to reason that the Romans took a look at the wild grapes in the Rías Baixas, liked what they saw, and got down to business taming and cultivating them.
Despite this, there’s a huge absence of reliable historical and archeological evidence to tell us one way or another if the Romans made wine in the Rías Baixas. To get ahold of the first documents that give us a clear idea of how winemaking got started, we need to jump ahead a few centuries.
The Medieval Period
The 9th-century discovery of the remains of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela led to an explosion of Christianity in Galicia. The church built over the apostle’s tomb began to receive pilgrims, slouching towards Santiago along what became known as The Way of Saint James, or simply El Camino. Churches and monasteries sprang up to serve the spiritual needs of the pilgrims along the Camino, and with them came the needs of the flesh: chiefly wine, the beverage par excellence of any good Spanish monk. The Benedictine monks of Cluny, already establishing themselves as pro winemakers, were sent to watch over these new centers of religion.
From Santiago, the spiritual home of Galician Christianity, the monks spread out to found new monasteries like the Monasterio de Armenteira in the Salnés Valley and Santa María de Oia near O Rosal. Sources from the centuries that followed trace the growth of vineyards all over the Rías Baixas, until by the 18th century they covered most of the territory included in the modern-day Denominación de Origen.
At the end of that same century, the Spanish government seized property owned by the Church and sold it off, so most of the monasteries’ former lands ended up in the hands of wealthy nobles. This didn’t have much effect on winemaking, which continued until a string of plagues threatened its very existence.
The Crisis of the 19th Century
In 1851, a creeping grey illness was affecting vines all over Spain. First appearing as grey patches, it quickly spread over entire vineyards, destroying crops and leaving nothing but misery in its wake. This was powdery mildew, known as oídium in Spanish. Its ideal growing conditions are humid places with gentle temperatures all year round. Sound familiar?
Powdery mildew took hold with a vengeance in Pontevedra province, destroying vines along the Miño River and sending families into years of hunger and misery. Although the consequences of this plague were grave, Pontevedra province wasn’t the most affected among the wine-growing areas of Galicia, and little by little the vines began to recover. When sulfur treatments arrived around 1860, it looked like the vines were finally saved and life could get back to normal.
Or not. Another plague, downy mildew or simply mildiu in Spanish, was on the horizon. By the time it landed in Galicia in 1885, treatments with Bordeaux mixture—a combination of copper sulfate, lime, and water—were already generalized in most of Spain. But this came with new costs for growers, and made the profits from viticulture increasingly scarce.
The biggest challenge to face European viticulture in the 19th century came in the form of a little louse known as phylloxera. It ate its way through most of the vines in France, provoking the greatest viticultural crisis in that country’s history. In Rías Baixas, phylloxera’s spread was slower than the rest of Galicia, and many vines escaped the eventual solution to the plague: being torn up and replaced with American rootstocks. For this reason, some of the oldest pre-phylloxeric vines in the world can be found in Meaño, dating back to at least the early 1700s.
The 20th Century
After phlloxera, vines all over Galicia were replaced with new grape varieties, most of which were grafted to naturally phylloxera-resitant American rootstock. In Pontevedra, however, growers opted for a different type of vine called híbridos productores directos (HPD) or “direct producer hybrids.” As their name tells us, these were plants created from the genetic cross between vitis rupestris or vitis riparia, species of grapes native to the United States, with vitis vinifera. Unlike other vines, HPDs could be planted directly, without any need for grafting. HPDs were successful in Pontevedra because they grew well—important when something like half the vitis-American grafts failed after planting—and they were considerably cheaper than other options.
Ironically, HPDs had incredibly low resistance to the very problem they were supposed to solve. They became successful in areas like the Salnés Valley, where phylloxera barely had any effect on pre-existing vines because of the humidity and sandy soils. Over the next few decades, HPDs would grow to become a majority of the vines planted in what’s today Rías Baixas, but there were still patches of traditional Galician varieties here and there.
Besides all these HPDs, locals grafted red grapes like espadeiro to American rootstock. And what of modern-day Rías Baixas’ most famous grape? It was there, but not nearly as prized as it was today. About all that’s written about it is that people in the area made wine with Albariño that was similar to the Vinho Verde of Portugal.
One reason for the grape’s scarcity for most of the twentieth century was that only the families with enough money to afford the luxury of a wine that wouldn’t be sold right away could plant albariño. Where most families sold all but a small part of their stock to make ends meet, Albariño wine was given as a gift or kept to enjoy the following summer. This kept it restricted to wealthier landowning families, who only produced small quantities. For everyone else, red wine reigned supreme: its higher yields meant growers were assured of an income. But in just a few short decades, all that was about to change.
Albariño: The Comeback Kid
In 1953, Bernardino Quintanilla, a self-taught lawyer from Vigo with a small vineyard of Albariño, made a bet. He challenged Ernesto Zárate, a local landowner and winemaker, to a vinous duel: the lawyer suggested that his wine could conquer his friend’s in a tasting. Zárate accepted the challenge, and on the night of August 28, 1953 they held the first-ever Concurso do Albariño, or the Albariño Competition. It wasn’t only Quintanilla and Zárate who participated; in total, nine growers from a select circle of mutual acquaintances presented their wines at a dinner held in a friend’s garden.
In the end, neither Campanilla nor Zárate won! Local farmer José Rodiño took home first prize and left the two men hungry for a rematch. What began as a bet between friends turned into a competition that was celebrated the next year, and the next year, and the next.
70 years later, the Festa do Albariño is a Galician summer staple, and holds a lot of the credit for catapulting this previously unknown Galician grape to fame.
But a yearly festival wouldn’t do much without a quality product to promote. Luckily, technological advances in both viticulture and winemaking helped to regularize Albariño production. At the end of the 1970s, the little grape hadn’t just become popular in Galicia, but it was starting to spread to the rest of Spain too.
The Birth of a Wine Region
The little wine region we know today as Rías Baixas was starting to look more like its modern-day version at the end of the 1970s. The lure of Albariño was strong, and merchants were buying it for triple the price of red wine. Pooling their resources, local growers formed a cooperative winery, soon to be followed by other cooperatives. Driven by demand for Albariño in the restaurants of Santiago and A Coruña, they began using innovations like stainless steel tanks and temperature-controlled fermentations to ensure clean, drinkable, consumer-friendly wines. But these higher-quality Albariños were still a minority, outnumbered by low-quality, high-alcohol, fruity wines imported from Castilla. Some distributors mixed these wines with a small proportion of Galician wine, and sold them as Albariño from Galicia.
There certainly wasn’t any sense of regional unity either. At the beginning of the 1980s, no one was using the term Rías Baixas, and most people didn’t even refer to Albariño by the its name! Instead, consumers tended to order wine using what are today the region’s subzones, differentiating between a “Condado,” a “Rosal,” and a “Salnés.” A lot of producers didn’t use any label at all, which left consumers in the dark as to the wine’s origins.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s, people began to push back against these practices, calling for the creation of an official wine appellation to regulate the wines claiming to be Albariño. They knew that they had a quality product on their hands, if they could just separate out the phony “Albariño” on the market.
In 1980, the answer came in the form of the Denominación Específica Albariño, an appellation that applied only to wines made with Albariño within a recognized geographical area, which—showing great restraint—contained the whole of Galicia. The Denominación Específica was created in 1981. That same year, the newly-formed consello regulador held technical workshops and tried to come up with regulations to help control production and quality, as well as crack down on fraud while launching Albariño into a larger marketplace.
But this Denominación Específica was doomed from the start. Spain’s looming entry into the European Economic Community meant it would have to comply with the rest of Europe and use a system of appellations based not on grape variety, but rather on origin. The logic was that no one can exclusively lay claim to a specific variety: grapes can be planted anywhere, regardless of whether they appear under one or more appellations of origin.
As a result, the Denominación Específica became a Denominación de Origen. To be able to successfully sell their wines to the rest of Europe, Albariño producers needed to enter the Common Market under the umbrella of “quality wines,” which implied obtaining a designation of origin. Otherwise, they would have to sell a product they considered to be of high quality as ordinary table wine, which was as much a matter of pride as it was a pragmatic economic decision.
But, as anyone who has tangled with bureaucrats knows, there’s always a catch. In order for the fledgling DO to be approved, the law required that at least 25% of the proposed appellation’s vineyards be planted with preferred grape varieties and registered with the regulatory council. This seriously affected Pontevedra province, since it was covered with HPDs and some vineyards were made up of 80 or 90% hybrid varieties.
The immediate consequence was that some areas of the Salnés, O Rosal, and Condado do Tea were temporarily excluded from the new appellation, although they could enter when they reached the required 25% of authorized varieties.
The task of ensuring that they had enough eligible hectares fell to some pioneering winemakers. Marisol Bueno, José Antonio Lopez, Manolo Padín, and Hernando Martínez covered the countryside, holding meetings and trying by any means necessary to convince the region’s often-skeptical growers to register their vines and in some cases replace the high-production hybrids with Albariño, a complicated variety whose yields would be much lower. Convincing a Galician to do anything is near impossible work. But somehow they did it. On July 4, 1988 the new wine appellation, with Marisol Bueno as its president, was officially approved by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Rías Baixas in the 21st Century
In just over 30 years of existence, Rías Baixas has lived a meteoric rise to fame, both nationally and internationally.
The 900,000 kilos of grapes that entered the DO in 1988 have grown to 43 million in the 2021 vintage. The vines that produce all these grapes now cover over 4,000 hectares, a far cry from the humble 237 hectares 30 years ago. About a third of the 36 million bottles sold in 2021 made their way to more than 70 countries, with key markets in the United States, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan. The three cooperatives, Condes de Albarei, Paco & Lola, and Martín Codax lead the business, with this last one helped in no small part by the deal signed in 2007 between Martín Codax and E&J Gallo, the world’s largest wine distributor. Within Spain, sales have increased as well. In 2021, Rías Baixas marked a growth in sales of 14.6%, a full two points above the average growth of wine consumption in Spain. Two new subzones were added to help meet all this demand: Soutomaior, in1996, and Ribeira do Ulla, in 2000.
With wine sales skyrocketing, the main challenge Rías Baixas will face in the years to come will be to create greater value for its wines, repositioning them in a category of quality for which consumers are willing to pay more. The DO is already making progress as far as exports are concerned: a liter of Albariño goes for a higher price than the average for Spanish wines.
But all this growth is not without its critics: some caution that Rías Baixas runs the risk of dying from success. Successful marketing campaigns and steady growth in sales have left wineries without any stock to spare for several years now. For a product largely dependent on the whims of Mother Nature, a bad harvest could prove disastrous. Others criticize the use of commercial yeasts in place of wild ones, or the mixture of grapes from one subzone with another.