For Albariño, It’s Time to Start Talking About Terroir

There's more to Rias Baixas' star grape than just fresh, fruity, young, and easy-drinking.

Jan 10, 2025

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This is the second post in our “Winter Whites” series, running each Friday in January. This Rias Baixas report is by our Galician wine expert, Noah Chichester, author of winesofgalicia.com. Last Friday’s post was on Loire Chenin Blanc.

I have a problem with the way people communicate Spanish wine—okay, several problems. But one I really hate is a tendency toward oversimplification. The “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in WSET 2” effect, if you will.

For example: Rioja is bold and smells like vanilla and dill, albariño is fresh and fruity and young, and Cava is like Champagne if you don’t have any money.

It’s not bad for selling wine, as far as the consumer is concerned. From various conversations I’ve had with Spaniards, their logic goes that your average international consumer thinks that Sancerre is a grape and orders something from the chardonnay-cabernet-pinot trifecta more often than not. And that might be true. But where wine professionals are concerned, there must be a reason why people pore over Masnaghetti’s maps of Barolo but don’t ask what village their albariño comes from. There’s a wealth of terroir knowledge out there about other countries. Why does no one care when it comes to Spain?

It’s not entirely the Spaniards’ fault, because they haven’t had as much time as the French or Italians to really tease out the nuances of how certain grape varieties behave in certain soil types and why some parcels might yield better wines than others.

Take a region like Rías Baixas and a grape like albariño, for example. The Rías Baixas wine region as we know it today has only been around since 1988. Here’s a nonexhaustive list of things older than DO Rías Baixas: MTV; Sony Discman; the PG-13 Rating: Cabbage Patch Kid; Apple MacIntosh; Channing Tatum. In fact, much of the vineyard land planted with albariño only happened after the DO was founded.

Despite the region’s youth, it’s still not hard to distinguish differences between Rías Baixas wines. Far from the one-size-fits-all concept of “salty, mineral, fresh, fruity,” Rías Baixas offers a dizzying array of ways to look at the albariño grape, and it’s time we started talking about it.

Rias Baixas’ five subzones each give us unique expressions of albariño: Val do Salnés is the most important subzone in Rías Baixas, with 113 out of 178 wineries, three-quarters of the region’s growers and just over half the appellation’s vineyards. It’s the coolest and wettest, regularly battered by Atlantic squalls. Its wines are the classic image of albariño: mineral and saline, with lip-smacking Granny Smith apple and lemon-lime candy.

To the southeast, the Condado do Tea couldn’t be more different. The inland subzone is warmer and drier, and the wines are riper and more unctuous, with aromas of honeysuckle and those little Mandarin oranges in syrup your mom used to pack in your school lunch. O Rosal’s vineyards sit on the undulating hills close to the Miño River, and the wines show more tropical citrus and stone fruit. Up north in Ribeira do Ulla, the wines are steelier and herbaceous, more in tune with their inland, northerly origins where growers use fans in the vineyards to keep away frost.

So we should be talking about how albariño from Meaño tastes different from albariño from Crecente tastes different from albariño from Sanxenxo. Why haven’t these differences been part of the talking points from the beginning? The Spanish tendency to oversimplify strikes again.

When Rías Baixas was first finding its feet in the 1980s, the first generation of wines to hit the big time were indeed simple, fresh, young, fruity, easy-drinking wines. They were the products of more basic vinifications in stainless steel, turning out wines that were harvested in September and completely sold out before Christmas—a practice which continues to this day, in some cases. As albariño took off, the marketing followed a “keep it simple” path. Fresh, fruity, young.

But since the early 2000s, we’ve been able to see a more complex side of albariño, thanks to the use of winemaking techniques like cold soaking or longer lees contact. Many producers are studying their soils in order to understand each vineyard and vinify the most interesting parcels. “20 or 30 years ago they said that albariño was simple, that it couldn’t reflect terroir, and that it couldn’t age. In my opinion that’s been proven wrong,” says Manu Méndez of Do Ferreiro. “We’ve demonstrated that albariño is a variety that can age, show different terroirs, and is incredibly interesting from a winemaking perspective.”

The old oversimplification might also be a reaction to the immense complexity of Rías Baixas. Soil studies are a step in the right direction, but with the way winegrowing works here it would be impossible to vinify plot by plot like you can in other parts of the world.

Picture a plot of vines the size of a one-bedroom apartment. Now picture 22,000 of them. For centuries, Galician inheritance laws distributed land equally between all surviving children, rather than the eldest male heir taking everything as was common in the rest of Europe. In practice, that meant that an already tiny piece of land was divided over and over again, until we’re left with the ridiculous amount of parcels that exist today.

Méndez notes that while it would be “great, enologically-speaking, to have 60 or 80 different single-vineyard bottlings, it would be impossible for a restaurant or wine shop to work with all of them.” Bearing that in mind, he chose to work with different soil types, rather than isolating a single plot or section of a vineyard. Others have had success in making just a few single-vineyard wines from standout parcels and combining their other parcels in entry-level wines.

That’s necessary too, says Méndez. In order for a region to evolve, you have to get to know the terroir, but also learn to make a selection of terroirs. “Not every parcel can yield a special bottling,” he says. “Why does France distinguish between Premier Cru and Grand Cru vineyards? Not every wine can be outstanding—we have to evaluate that as a region and each producer has to self-evaluate.”

In price-conscious Rías Baixas, forever concerned about competing with other Spanish white wines like Verdejo from Rueda, having different tiers would be welcome. “You can have a pyramidal system of pricing,” says Méndez. “An entry-level wine has to be priced so someone who wants to enjoy a good bottle of wine can have access to it, and then you need the top wines to have a different price.”

Unfortunately, the DO’s marketing hasn’t even kept up with these developments. You’ll still see the same large (and cheap) albariño brands compared to Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc, and hear that it’s more or less the same, regardless of the subzone. So we need to push back on this narrative, and make it easier for wine lovers to find true terroir-focused examples of albariño. Here are four wines worth seeking out that transmit a sense of place among the “fresh and fruity” jumble.