The Ribeira do Ulla (“banks of the Ulla,” in Galician) subzone was the last to join the Rías Baixas Designation of Origin in 2000. It’s the largest subzone by surface area, and the only one that straddles the provinces of Pontevedra and A Coruña. Today Ribeira do Ulla produces around 10% of Rías Baixas’ albariño grapes.
A Little Geography
Ribeira do Ulla is the northernmost subzone in Rías Baixas, straddling the provinces of Pontevedra and A Coruña just south of Santiago de Compostela.
The Ulla River cuts through the middle of the subzone, through its own river valley. The Ulla Valley is a comarca, or shire, known as “the garden of Santiago de Compostela” for its fertile soils, meadows, and vineyards. It’s made up of the municipalities of Boqueixón, A Estrada, Padrón, Silleda, Teo, Touro, Viladecruces and Vedra. Like the rest of the Rías Baixas, soils here are mostly granitic and sandy, with some alluvial soils around the Ulla River.
One constant of Galicia’s geography is that altitude increases the further you get from the coast. Ribeira do Ulla’s inland location means its vineyards are located at higher altitudes than those of the other subzone in the Rías Baixas. This creates bigger shifts in temperature between day and night, increasing the freshness and fruitiness of the wines. But this slight climate difference also has its drawbacks. The risk of spring frosts is higher in Ribeira do Ulla, as cool air settles in the bottoms of valleys. To combat this, some resourceful growers install giant fans in their vineyards to circulate the air and avoid cool air masses settling in the vineyards.
Growth and Growing Pains
You might be asking yourself why Ribeira do Ulla, which isn’t in the geographical Rías Baixas, is in DO Rías Baixas.
That’s exactly the question posed by growers of the Salnés Valley when Ribeira do Ulla was up for inclusion in 2000. The argument was that a wine region should be based on a geographical zone, not the grapes grown there. The counter-argument from Rías Baixas’ leadership was that when the DO was founded in 1986, they inherited what was left of the Denominación Específica Albariño, with areas of high-quality albariño production that were left out of the original Rías Baixas DO and were now returning to their origin.
The leadership won.
Ribeira do Ulla became DO Rías Baixas’ newest subzone in 2000, and it basically hasn’t stopped growing since. Every year there are more hectares of vines, accompanied by new wineries and business projects. Not everyone is happy. In 2023, residents on both banks of the Ulla River started a petition asking the Xunta de Galicia to deny all new requests to plant vineyards, citing negative consequences of vine monoculture like the loss of forests, the intensification of soil erosion, and pollution from chemical products used to spray the vines. So far they haven’t gotten a response from the Regulatory Council.
These new industrial albariño plantations couldn’t be more different from the model of small wineries like Castro Brey, known for their “Sin Palabras” wines, and others who started planting in the 1980s, and the gulf between the two models of viticulture is deepening. With increased demand for albariño at cheap prices, it remains to be seen whether Rías Baixas’ leadership will listen to the community’s protests and slow down the massive plantations being planned for Ribeira do Ulla.
Ribeira do Ulla Stats
Wines labeled as “Rías Baixas Ribeira do Ulla” are multi-varietal wines made from at least 70% albariño, loureira, treixadura and caiño branco, with the other 30% made up of other authorized white grapes.
Apart from being the youngest subzone, Ribeira do Ulla is the subzone with the lowest rate of plots per winegrower. Rather than one grower owning many plots, here Galicia’s characteristic smallholdings are divvied up between a large number of people. It’s also pretty common to see plots that are fairly spread out, with pergolas of vines tucked between cornfields and meadows of grazing cows. This is changing in recent years as massive plantations of vines pop up on the banks of the Ulla—the work of industrial wineries capitalizing on the Albariño boom.
Wines from Ribeira do Ulla
White wines from Ribeira do Ulla tend to have higher alcohol than the other subzones, reaching up to 13.5% in normal vintages. This gives them more body and horizontal structure than the acid-driven, vertical wines of Val do Salnés. The granite soils here are also less sandy in texture than those closer to the coast, which contributes subtle reductive aromas which become more well-integrated over time. Wines from Ribeira do Ulla are similar in profile to wines from the Condado do Tea, with greater temperature differences resulting in fuller-bodied wines with aromas that tend toward peach, apricot, and ripe citrus.
Want to know more? Dive deeper into Rías Baixas’ subzones.
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