Ribeira Sacra is an adventure in terroir…varied and unique and surprising from one hillside to another.

This northwestern corner of Spain is a landscape of remote extremes. Too steep for modern machinery and too harsh for modern varietals, it has been abandoned for generations but unchanged since the Romans terraced and planted it some 2000 years ago to make wines for their armies marching to the sea.

Today, a new generation of winemakers have taken over tending the hillsides and cliffs and are making remarkable wine, as individual and spectacular as the landscape itself.

The Dominio do Bibei vineyard is my first experience with the Quiroga-Bibei subregion, the most southern of the five wine growing regions in Ribeira Sacra. The Bibei hillsides are impossibly steep, from 55 to 100% grades, arid and hot and challenging to farm. The earth is clay and slate and rock hard and a microclimate considerably different from the other areas of Ribeira Sacra. Many, if not most of the ancient vineyards here were abandoned for a generation or more.

Javier Dominguez, armed with vision, patience and funding, is the force behind the Dominio do Bibei vineyard. With his wife, he set out to rebuild an ancient vineyard on this mountain side in the Bibei Valley that had been deserted for a decade but had scattered plantings of ancient vines, many of them over 100 years old.

Dominguez wanted to create wine that spoke of the hillside and valley he built his vineyard on. His approach to discovering terroir was to interfere with the vines to the most minimal amount possible. Everything in the winery is done naturally with gravity fed processes, natural yeasts, and fermentation in carved stone or cement ‘foudres’ or tanks. He was looking for a subtler, mineral taste from the Mencia grape that let the fruit sink to the background and the mineral and acidity carry the lighter tannin flavors.

Congratulations Javier….this is a great bottle of wine. An aficionado’s dream!

The Lalama ’06 Ribiera Sacra is a blend of 85% Mencia and equal parts of Garnacha, Brancellao, and Mouraton made from a mixture of vines as young as 15 years and as old as 100. This is a traditional blend for Ribiera Sacra but Javier added one modern touch, fermenting the grapes separately then blending them all together. In the past, the vines were grown and harvested and fermented together.

This Mencia blend is spicy and light, remarkably medium bodied, savory with a gentle balance between the spice and citrus. Even with a high alcohol content, it tastes fresh and aerated and ready to drink.

This bottle is quite luscious…weightless and aromatic and fulfilling. Really a great wine with food and cheese. Certain to surprise and satisfy at any dinner party.

Available at $36 a bottle from Chambers Street Wines in TriBeCa NYC and online wine merchants.

Check out posts on other wines from Ribeira Sacra here and here and here.

There is a quiet revolution of young winemakers in obscure corners of the earth, in impossible terrain, making palate enlightening wine in new ways with ancient and natural methods. Louis Rodriguez is one of them.

He is making wine naturally from indigenous grapes I’ve never heard of that taste everyday fresh, beautifully savory, exotically unfamiliar yet easy to drink.

My Spanish wine mentor, Chris Barnes calls Louis Rodriguez ‘Ribeiro Royalty’. I agree wholeheartedly. He is also the president of the DO Ribeiro and to many, the top producer in the area.

Louis works 27 (25 hectares in total) mostly prime south-facing plots.  These plots are at high elevations on steep granite slopes over-looking the small bodega of Arnoia. This is a lush, and humid place with two rivers, the Mino and the Arnoia running through it.

He produces four wines, two red and two white. Less than 500 cases of each wine is made. The whites are blends of Treixadura, Albariño, Torrontés, Godello and Lado, while the reds are blended from Brancellao, Caiño, and Ferrol. All of the wines are fermented with natural yeasts and bottled unfiltered.

This wildly obscure place is impossibly hostile to agriculture.  They harvest by hand because the land is too steep for machines. These terraces were originally cut by the Romans some 2000 years ago to supply wine for their armies marching to the Atlantic. Quite a place.

A Torna Dos Pasa Tinto is a blend of three indigenous grapes, Caiño Tinto, Ferrol, Brancellão. I was expecting something typically Spanish, like a great Mencia, I found something foreign, organic but incredibly well structured with layered tannins and a finish that lingered and evolved for a surprisingly long time.

This is a great bottle of wine. It inspired me to buy more and try it over time. It keeps delivering on its promise.

At $36 a bottle, it is a reasonable price for an exceptional wine.

Chambers Street Wines, always the champion of the small, the unknown, the impossible to find, the organic, the reasonable and the incredible has some in stock as of this post.