Ribeiro is the stuff of fairy tales and legends. Long before it was recognized as a wine appellation, the three valleys that make up O Ribeiro were the heart of wine production in Galicia.
The valleys of the Mino, Avia, and Arnoia have been tilled by generations of people who, over the course of the centuries, perfected the best way to take advantage of their vines and their environment. Viticulture is in their souls, and the waters of the three rivers flow through their landscapes and their lives.
It wasn’t always easy. Surviving the tumultuous period after the Spanish Civil War meant many people had to abandon their vines completely and emigrate to look for work. Some pulled up the traditional Galician varieties in favor of others with a better guarantee of yields and profits. In spite of these challenges, wine production in Ribeiro never stopped. Skills and techniques were still passed on from generation to generation, and in the final decades of the twentieth century Ribeiro began to come back from the edge of the abyss, with welcome injections of capital and renewed interest in viticulture resulting in a resurgence of interest in the region.
Part One: Monks
People have been making wine in Ribeiro since as early as the end of the 2nd century BC. Although no one knows when the first vines were planted, it’s clear that the Romans were just as active in Ribeiro as in the rest of Galicia. Later, with the arrival of Christianity, Cistercian monks recovered and revitalized viticulture, studying and drinking the fruit of their vines. These monks, settled in the monasteries of San Clodio and Oseira, worked the land around the three river valleys and gradually expanded viticulture outward until monasteries further afield came into possession of properties in Ribeiro.
Powerful Galician ecclesiastical centers all needed a regular supply of good quality wine that wasn’t going to go bad during its journey from vineyard to monastery. They needed wine with the highest possible alcohol to guarantee its conservation, which called for grapes that could ripen as much as possible. In medieval Galicia, there was only one ideal place for this: the lands of “ripa Avia,” with its temperate climate, sunshine, and people with the agricultural knowledge to guarantee the best harvests.
By the 12th century “wine from Ribadavia” was famous all over Spain and became an object of desire for clergy, high-ranking bishops, and even kings.
Part Two: Mules
The monasteries in wine-producing areas like Ribeiro had all the grapes they needed right at their fingertips. But how to get wine to monasteries and churches that weren’t in the valleys? The solution was four-legged, hairy, and stubborn as, well, a mule.
For centuries, muleteers known as arrieiros hitched up their animals and set off on the journey between Ribadavia and major cities like Pontevedra, A Coruña, and Santiago de Compostela. It wasn’t easy work by any means: they carried hundreds of liters of wine over the mountains separating Ribeiro from the rest of Galicia. As if the work of loading and hauling wine wasn’t enough, the arrieiros had to put up with Galician weather: beating wind and torrential rain, and even blizzards that could get them lost in the mountains. Their liquid cargo traveled inside pelexos, containers made from the skin of a goat turned inside out and treated with a mixture of oil and pine pitch to protect the wine.
Santiago de Compostela was one of the arrieiros‘ biggest customers since the city needed wine for its monks, bishops and later, pilgrims. The discovery of the remains of Saint James in the 9th century eventually put Santiago on the map as the third holiest pilgrimage site in Christendom.
The first monastery in the city, San Paio de Antealtares, began giving their thirsty pilgrims Ribeiro wine. From there, demand began to rise and there was no turning back. For the next nine centuries, mules and their drivers plodded across Galicia, carrying the reputation of Ribeiro wine with them.
The arrieiros didn’t just carry wine to Galicia’s cities and monasteries: in time, liquid gold would pour out of Ribeiro and head to nearly all corners of the old—and new—worlds.
It started, and ended, with the Brits. Stories of drunk British tourists and their misadventures in places like Benidorm and the Costa del Sol are pretty well-known today, but the very first English hooligans to wake up with a hangover did so in Ribadavia. In 1386, the Duke of Lancaster decided to stake a claim to the throne of Castilla. His short-lived invasion began in Galicia, where he and his troops landed in A Coruña and made their way south, taking over the most important towns and generally causing mayhem wherever they went.
Chronicler Jean Froissart reported the siege and capture of Ribadavia, writing that when they entered the town, the English soldiers found wine that was “so strong they could barely drink it,” and that “they drank so much the hangover lasted two whole days.” Despite their monumental headaches, the English must have gotten a taste for this Ribadavia wine. After negotiating peace with his competition the Duke returned to England, taking with him all the gold he could carry… and a ship full of Galician wine.
In the years that followed, shipping records show something called “Rubidage” arriving in English ports—probably some sailor’s botched attempt to pronounce Ribadavia. Already famous in Spain, the wines of Ribeiro had found another market in the British Isles.
In time, Ribeiro’s fame spread to all of Europe, reaching France, Portugal, Italy, Flanders, and especially Great Britain. Merchants sent wine to Galicia’s ports, where they loaded it onto ships bound for the rest of Europe. And soon it would travel across the ocean to what the Spanish were calling the “New World.” According to historian Alain Huetz de Lemps, one hundred years after Columbus and his men made landfall in San Salvador, 127 barrels of Ribeiro wine were shipped from Galician port city Ferrol to the Americas at a price of 190 reales each—a price almost equivalent to what Sherry sold for at the time.
Ribeiro wine was also probably the first Spanish wine to reach the Pacific Ocean. Historical documents decreed that the captain general of the Philippines, Gómez Pérez das Mariñas, was authorized to consume three barrels of “Ribadavia wine” at his wife’s funeral in 1563.
The wine trade was of such importance that steps were taken to avoid fraud—something that could make Ribeiro the oldest wine appellation in the world.
To avoid fraudulent sales of just any wine called Ribeiro in A Coruña and other cities, a geographical denomination of origin “Ribadavia” was carefully drawn up in 1564. Later, to prevent wines of dubious quality from being mixed with the real thing, the Ordinances of 1579 established limits on what kinds of wine could enter Ribadavia and be sold as Ribeiro. This sounds awfully like the modern-day concept of a wine appellation, meaning Ribeiro would predate the Douro by about 200 years as Europe’s oldest demarcated wine region.
..que el vino de Ribadavia ha de ser de la villa de Ribadavia hasta la puente de San Clodio de las partes siguientes: primeramente la feligresía San Payo, San Andrés de Camporredondo, Esposende, Pezoshermos, hasta llegar a la dha. Puente San Clodio toda la orilla del rio Avia y de allí revolver el rio abajo Vieyte, Beade, Carballeda, San Cristobal de Rigodeygon, Ribadavia…
…wine from Ribadavia must be from the town of Ribadavia to the bridge of San Clodio of the following parts: the parish of San Payo, San Andrés de Camporredondo, Esposende, Pezoshermos [sic] until reaching the San Clodio bridge the entire bank of the Avia river and from there turn the river down Vieyte [sic], Beade, Carballeda, San Cristóbal de Rigodeygon [sic], Ribadavia…
By the late 16th century, Anglo-Ribeiro trade was at an all-time high, but a couple of squabbling monarchs were about to bring it all tumbling down.
In the late 1500s, Protestant England and Catholic Spain edged closer to outright war, and King Philip II saw an opportunity to punish his enemies. He placed prohibitions on the wine trade, making it more difficult for British merchants to import Ribeiro.
What neither Philip nor merchants in Ribeiro anticipated was that the English would go looking for their wine elsewhere. They found their perfect match further south, at the mouth of the Douro river in Porto and on the island of Madeira. After Portugal’s independence in 1668, English traders set up shop in Porto, and exported wines from the Douro valley back home to England.
These first Portuguese wines didn’t have anything to do with the full-bodied, sweet Port wines of today. In fact, one of the first English importers of this new Portuguese wine wrote that wines from the Douro had to be mixed with Ribeiro to adjust them to the English palate! But over the years, Ribeiro’s influence waned as Port wines grew to become some of the best-loved wines in England, reaching the world-famous status they enjoy today.
Part Three: Modernity
Back in Ribeiro, things took a turn for the worse. Deprived of their best customers, growers found themselves forced to pull up vines and families went hungry. The 19th century was especially tough, when in the mid-1800s a perfect storm of famine and grapevine diseases swept through Ribeiro, driving thousands of people to emigrate and thousands more to die of starvation. At the same time, the Spanish government seized and redistributed church property, much like the how French Revolution broke up Burgundian estates long held by monasteries. In Spain, the majority of the properties were auctioned off and sold to rich aristocrats—the only ones with the money to be able to buy the tracts of land on offer.
Ribeiro was hit by the 19th-century triple threat of powdery mildew, downy mildew, and phylloxera, although it was mostly spared the fate of other European and Spanish wine regions. But new and necessary sulfur treatments against mildew were expensive, and meant most growers could no longer afford to maintain their vines by themselves.
This led to widespread abandonment of the centuries-old terraces that surrounded the three valleys of Ribeiro, and the consolidation of property in the hands of landowners who could afford to maintain them. Faced with falling profits and a lack of manpower to tend vines, landowners replaced traditional grapes like treixadura with palomino and garnacha tintorera which had higher yields and guaranteed income.
By the 1920s and 30s the region found itself still exporting wine to the rest of Galicia, sometimes mixed with wines from neighboring Castilla that came in on the newly-arrived railroad. Wanting to make a quick buck, growers and middlemen who sold wine to taverns in the cities would pass Castilian wine off as Ribeiro, taking advantage of the former’s cheap price and the latter’s fame. The Spanish Civil War put a pause on economic activities, but this tampering with wine continued well into the 20th century.
Faced with fake wine in the marketplace and a lack of manpower in the vineyards and cellars, growers and landowners pooled their resources in a cooperative winery.
The first cooperative began in 1953, but didn’t begin to turn a profit until ten years later. Demand in the market had changed, and white wine was becoming more popular than red. The cooperative was slow to address this, but after decades of working in fits and starts with bankruptcy scares in between, it finally consolidated its wines and rebranded, naming the flagship wine “Viña Costeira.”
Although most growers had palomino and garnacha tintorera, a few people had maintained traditional grapes in their vineyards. In the 1980’s, pioneers like Emilio Rojo and Luis Anxo Rodriguez showed the world that they could still make a top-quality wine from Ribeiro’s lost grapes. Seeing their success, more and more people planted traditional grapes, and by the early 21st century Ribeiro was able to regain some of its lost splendor as the home of world-class quality white wines.
Ribeiro Today
The modern Ribeiro wine region has 96 wineries and a bit over 1,600 growers, producing around 8 million liters of wine a year. Around 5 percent of this is exported to countries like Germany, Belgium, Japan, the UK, and the US, with the vast majority of Ribeiro wine consumed in Spain. All told, the modern wine trade in Ribeiro moves about €31.5 million annually.
It’s come a long way from the famine and poverty of the 19th century, but modern Ribeiro doesn’t even scratch the surface of what it was 500 years ago. Over eighty percent of the vineyards that once thrived here have been abandoned, and year after year the forest reclaims more territory. Aging growers abandon their vines and no one steps up to replace them. Young people move to the cities, unconvinced by rural life.
The “obvious” answer to Ribeiro’s problems is to recover its lost terraces and restore them to their rightful place in Galicia’s viticultural and architectural heritage. The reality is more complicated. To begin with, decades of neglect and the uninhibited growth of trees means that it would take a Herculean effort–not to mention heavy machinery and a whole lot of money–to begin to restore them to the conditions required to plant vines.
Some wineries have begun to buy plots of land on top of the mountains, where there are no inconvenient terraces to work around. But in an area where every square inch of land that could be planted with vines was tilled over the course of eight centuries, if there weren’t already vines there it’s probably for a good reason. Above the 350 meter line that traditionally marked the top limit of vineyards, grapes simply don’t mature as well. Wineries aim to combat this with modern methodologies: vegetation management, treatments, and in some cases irrigation.
Despite this grim picture, there are plenty of winemakers who are betting on Ribeiro’s future. From second- and third- generation winemaking families to small growers who are just starting out, Ribeiro remains a strong wine region whose future is still to be written. We can only hope that the global economy allows more young Galicians to see the beauty and history in recovering their land and restoring it—bit by bit—to some of its former glory.