Denominación de Origen Ribeira Sacra is one of the greatest inventions of the last half century. It isn’t a comarca, like Ribeiro or Monterrei. It’s not a historically agreed-upon area. It isn’t even in one province.
But the inventors of the Ribeira Sacra banded together around shared geography, winemaking tradition, and love for their land to create the wine appellation that exists today.
How did this come to be?
The Sacred Riverbank
Ribeira Sacra. “The Sacred Riverbank.” You have to admit, it’s a name that instantly conjures up the two most important aspects of this region: riverbanks and monasteries. And we can’t begin to understand this landscape without the monasteries, perched on towering cliffs far away from the prying eyes and influences of the material world.
No one knows for sure when people first started making wine here, but the first vineyards are probably linked to the Romans. Once their wartime service was over, legionnaires received land as payment for their services. Being Romans, they probably started cultivating wild grapevines they found, and the rest is history. Later, 8th- and 9th-century communities of monks looking for solitude came to the banks of the Miño and Sil. They built monasteries and dedicated the best areas to vineyards.
Thanks to the work of these medieval monks, the river canyons were transformed. The settlements clinging to their edges cultivated vines and fruit trees, and at the top of the slopes trees provided firewood, stakes for the vines, and the all-important chestnut—the main starch in the pre-potato Galician diet.
We don’t know much more about medieval winemaking in the Ribeira Sacra, but it’s possible that the monasteries in the Sil and Miño canyons supplied wine to other church centers to the north, near the city of Lugo. Along with wine from Ribeiro, a thriving medieval wine trade connected all of Galicia.
Over the next few centuries, wine made in the Ribeira Sacra stayed there. The winegrowing economy was pretty small and insular: each wine-growing area usually supplied a group of villages and farms that surrounded them, often in the higher areas above the canyon walls. Monasteries paid local growers a small sum for the grapes they eked out from the terraced vineyards, while farming families who lived above the canyon’s slopes subsisted on cattle, pig, or wheat farming and got their wine for daily drinking from their neighbors lower down. For example, growers in Cristosende and A Teixeira supplied the monastery and villages near Montederramo, etc. On the Miño side, Pantón and Saviñao had customers in the higher-altitude areas. Among the towns whose liquid product traveled beyond the Sil and Miño to regional capitals, Sober, Amandi, and Chantada stand out for making famous wines.
The 19th Century
The 19th century began shaping situations in the Ribeira Sacra that continue to this day. The vine diseases that devastated Europe would find their way into the Sil and Miño, and the arrival of the railroad was about to completely change Galicia’s winemaking economy.
To begin to understand this history, we can’t forget the minifundio. This is a Galician cultural staple: smallholdings—sometimes the size of a vegetable garden—that traditionally functioned as the orchard, garden, chicken run, cow pasture, and wheat field of rural Galician families. Inheritance laws said that property had to be divided up equally between the heirs instead of the oldest male heir ending up with everything, so what might have started out small got smaller with each passing generation. Up until the 19th century, it was common not to own the property you worked, so laborers had no choice but to do what the caciques or “strong men” told them.
When vines had to be replanted after phylloxera, the laborers were told to replace their old vines of mouratón and brancellao with new varieties like mencía and garnacha tintorera that came from nurseries further east in Valdeorras and Castilla-León, promising resistance to mildew and higher yields. For nearly a century, mencía and garnacha tintorera would form the backbone of wines made in small quantities for self consumption.
The arrival of the railroad in the late 1800s also hastened the decline of the Ribeira Sacra as a winemaking powerhouse. Growers whose backbreaking labor on small, steeply-sloped plots had to compete with wine that came in from flat, fertile Castilla. At the time, no one in their right mind would pay more money for the wine coming out of the Sil canyon. Faced with these hard realities, huge numbers of people left the countryside and abandoned their land.
History, Washed Away
Galicia supplies about a tenth of Spain’s electricity, mostly via wind power and hydroelectric dams built during the Franco dictatorship. Under the Generalísimo‘s watchful eye, millions of tons of concrete flowed into the Miño and Sil to build the Os Peares (1955), Belesar (1963), Santo Estevo (1957) and San Pedro (1959) dams.
Their construction had an incalculable impact on the surroundings: not only did it flood the riverbanks and drown entire towns, cemeteries, roads and vineyards, it changed the flow of the rivers to the point of destroying many of the natural resources that were there before. Today, the reservoirs produce megawatts for Naturgy and Iberdrola, two of Spain’s largest electric companies.
Among the many losses was the small town of Portomarín, whose important medieval history led to it being declared a historical and artistic complex. More than two thousand hectares of land with vineyards, historic churches, and entire towns were washed away in the name of business.
The dams’ unpleasant legacy lives on to this day: in 2021 the Ribeira Sacra’s candidacy to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site was delayed, partly because of the hydroelectric dams. For UNESCO, the giant concrete semicircles cause a “visual impact” on the landscape that needs further justification.
An Area In Decline?
The place we know today as the Ribeira Sacra spans the Miño and Sil, taking advantage of a shared tradition of monasteries and winemaking. But historically, these weren’t enough to create a shared sense of identity.
The mountains to the south and the lack of good roads to larger cities in the north or east created pockets of isolation not only between the different canyons of the Sil and Miño, but also between towns along the same side of the river. For most of the 20th century, the Ribeira Sacra was cut off and cast aside from developments in the rest of Galicia, and the gradual abandonment of the countryside continued at a quicker and quicker pace.
In 1975 the Ministry of Agriculture published a report on the viticultural situation of Spain called “El Viñedo Español.” Where the vineyards of the Sil and Miño were concerned, the Ministry didn’t mince words: it rang a death knell for viticulture in the region.
The official opinion was that grape-growing couldn’t turn a profit. The trend was “frank regression” and about 30% of the vineyards were “semi-abandoned or carelessly cultivated.”
The situation wasn’t any better when another viticultural survey was published in 1983. Over 85% of plots in the Ribeira Sacra were less than a tenth of a hectare and there was hardly any wine made in meaningful quantities. Small family wineries made as much wine as they could, without no regard to quality-enhancing measures like reduced yields or cleanliness in the winery. Even for the wineries that were trying to make a go of serious winemaking, there was hardly a market to speak of. Something needed to change soon, or else winemaking would die out for good.
The Beginnings of a Wine Region
With Franco’s death in 1975, a sea of opportunities opened up for Spain. A new constitution, autonomous communities, and renewed government interest and money to revitalize the countryside.
Despite this influx of interest and capital, the problems of population drain continued. In the early 1980’s, the town of Amandi decided to try to attract people to the area by bringing back the traditional fair celebrated around Easter week, usually on Palm Sunday. Since agriculture was in decline, they decided to add to the potential list of participants by inviting local grape growers to show off their finished wine. This was no fancy wine tasting; it was more in line with the Galician “exaltation” of a specific food—in other words, an all-you-can-eat pigout on the town council’s dime.
The first fair had in attendance one cow and thirteen 32-liter barrels of wine for tasting. It’s probably a testament to the wine’s success that no one remembers what happened to the cow.
The next year focused solely on wine, and upped the quantity to 3,000 bottles bought from the growers and sold from the windows of the town hall for 125 pesetas each. The idea of bringing back the Palm Sunday fairs quickly caught on, and within a few years there were wine fairs in Chantada, Quiroga, and Pantón too.
With proof their wine could sell, the growers began to believe in a project that was being talked about around the province of Lugo, organized by an Agricultural Extension worker named José Mouriño.
Galicia’s Agricultural Extension program aimed to help rural farmers get the tools they needed to succeed in an increasingly competitive world, mostly through talks that passed on developments in science and technology. It was precisely these kinds of talks that led to the creation of a wine region. José Mouriño first came to this far-flung part of southern Lugo in 1973 and immediately fell in love. With the flood of government money in the 1980s, Mouriño worked with other growers and the few people who called themselves winemakers at the time to convince growers to help get a wine region off the ground.
All they needed was a name.
Creating the Ribeira Sacra
In 1124, Teresa of Portugal donated some land near modern-day Castro Caldelas to the monastery of Montederramo. In the letter of donation, she made special mention of the place called Rivoyra Sacrata. This name was repeated over the years in some history books as “Sacred Riverbank,” since people interpreted it as being linked to all the monasteries on the banks of the Sil and Miño.
There’s only one issue with this origin story: it probably isn’t true.
In 1987, the eminent Galician philologist Manuel Vidán Torreira argued that the word rivoyra is an erroneous transcription of revoyra, a name that doesn’t allude to a sacred riverbank, but rather to a sacred oak. (Revoyra = reboiro, a kind of oak in Galician.) The revoyra sacrata was a nearby oak grove known as the “Sacred Grove,” probably because of its importance to the ancient pre-Roman Castro culture whose religion was based around natural elements. Despite this thorough explanation, no one paid any attention to Torreira.
When it came time to name the new wine region, everyone had an opinion. Growers in Amandi said their wine was the most famous, so the region should be called Amandi. The only problem was that people in Chantada said the same thing. Different neutral names were proposed: “Sur de Lugo,” “Ribeiras do Miño y Sil,” and simply “Miño,” but none felt right. Luckily, fate had the answer.
Flipping through an old guide to Galicia, one of the naming committee struck gold: he came across the name “Rivoyra Sacrata.” It was quickly decided to change the name to the more Galician-sounding “Ribeira Sacra,” and the name has stuck around ever since.
In 1993, the designation of Viño da Terra Ribeira Sacra was approved, and in 1996 it became a full-fledged Denominación de Origen. From there, growth was slow but constant.
One advantage for the new wine appellation was the Galician government’s investment in rural tourism. Aiming to cater to an urban population that demanded alternate forms of tourism, one of their solutions was to send people to the countryside. They needed to unify an area that had been sliced and diced into different segments for years, and that was severely lacking in infrastructure. Luckily, the new Ribeira Sacra wine region laid out a perfect boundary for a touristic region, and thus began a symbiotic relationship where the Galician government spent most of the 90s investing in infrastructure: rehabilitating churches and monasteries and generally preparing the Ribeira Sacra to receive tourists—especially the wine-drinking kind.
Ribeira Sacra Today
26 years later, Ribeira Sacra has 1,276 hectares of vines, 2,291 growers, and 98 wineries. Production is still comparatively tiny, but has grown from 2.2 million kilos of grapes and 1.47 million liters in 1996 to 6.5 million kilos and 4.3 million liters of wine in 2022.
There’s a huge difference in volume between the biggest and smallest wineries, with some that barely reach 2,000 l/year and others that produce more than 1.5 million liters. Nine wineries account for 56% of the production, with the largest, Bodegas Rectoral de Amandi (Bodegas Gallegas), producing 34% of total Ribeira Sacra wine. Most of this wine stays within Spain, with the vast majority consumed in Galicia as affordable wines for everyday drinking.
National sales have doubled in the last ten years, with growing markets in Valencia, Cataluña, and Madrid. Exports account for only 6% of sales volume, with the United States leading the export market and followed by Switzerland, Norway, Russia, China, and Canada.
One reason for the region’s growth has come from producers committing to the recovery of native grape varieties. Little-known grapes like Brancellao, Merenzao, or Dona Branca have slowly but surely made their way into the appellation. Mencía remains the powerhouse, but native varieties have grown from a few thousand kilos of Brancellao, Merenzao, and Sousón in the early 2000s to ten and hundreds of thousands of kilos as of 2021.
The march toward creating complex, age-worthy wines is helmed by pioneers like Adega Algueira and Bodega Guímaro, both of whom worked with superstar winemaker Raúl Pérez to up their winemaking game. Pérez still makes wine with Rodri Méndez of Forjas del Salnés from parcels on the banks of the Miño sub-zone. Other winemakers like Pablo Soldavini, Xabi Seoane, or the Envínate team have also bet on the region’s future as high-toned expressions of terroir.