Is this the Most In-Depth Galician Wine Podcast Ever? It depends. Featuring Noah Chichester

Fresh off a four year stint in living in Galicia and Rioja, Noah Chichester gives an insider's picture of the history and importance of the terroirs and wines of Galicia.

In this episode, we wade into the depths of Galicia's viticultural renaissance, where historical vineyards are being tenderly nursed back to life by the hands of dedicated revivalists like Telmo Rodríguez, Luis Anxo, Emilio Rojo, and more. 

Noah guides us through a land where the supernatural weaves seamlessly with the everyday, and deep traditions coexist in a harmonious cultural tapestry. It's an exploration of an area where the very energy of the land is as integral to the flavor of the wine as the grapes themselves, and each glass serves as a portal to the mystical charm of Galicia.

Noah wrote the first english language website and verified reference point on the wines of Galicia: winesofgalicia.com. Check it out if you want to learn more about the magic of Galicia.

Find him on instagram @showmetheporron and @nchichester and in NY connecting the growers of De Maison to incredible restaurants and retailers.

Follow us on IG: @theporroncast and @demaisoneast

The Porróncast is hosted/produced by Ryan Looper - @iamlooper

Find us on your favorite Podcast platform by searching and hit follow! ---> Then share The Porrón (cast)...see how we did that...?

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For deeper information on any producer featured on this episode click here and search producer name
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If you find a Porrón on the back label of a bottle, it is imported to the USA exclusively by the spectacular importer and team @dmselections
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Original Music by Julian Tamers - @juliantamers on IG and Tiktok

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

No, are you ready for this?

Speaker 2: 0:02

I'm ready. Benvidos oh, porron cast.

Speaker 1: 0:08

A Gallego opener Great.

Speaker 2: 0:11

You want to hear a Galician tongue twister?

Speaker 1: 0:13

Sure.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Let's do this Se boa boa, numbo boa, se numbo boa boa, numbo numbo.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Okay, what'd you just call me? Yeah, perfect, get ready for some Galicia. Noah Chachester on the show today to talk about Galicia. How you doing, man. I'm doing good, so you're just off the boat. What was it like? You lived in Galicia for years. How'd you get to Galicia?

Speaker 2: 0:48

I got to Galicia by getting lucky. Basically I was out of college and I didn't know what to do with myself. So I found this program and said, all right, well, you've got a warm body, you're a beating heart and you're a native English speaker, you can come to Spain. So I said, well, that sounds great. And I applied. And when you, this is a Spanish government program so you can apply and you can go to a different autonomous community, like you know, on the Lusia, the Basque country, galicia, whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:13

So I'm from Northern New York, new Siberia, I like to call it, and it was very cold, very snowy. So I said I can't go to Southern Spain, I can't be in the sun, I'm going to melt. So I said, oh, I have to go somewhere in the north. It looks green, it's cool, I'll pick Galicia. And then I think the process after that is there's some kind of you know civil servant in a basement in Madrid with their you know eyes blindfolded and they're throwing darts at a map of Galicia. And they said, okay, you'll go there. So I ended up in this city called Acorunia, which is in the north, it's on the northern coast. Most people haven't heard of it. They might have heard of Santiago. The Camino goes to Santiago, but Carunia is a little bit off the beaten path.

Speaker 1: 1:53

Yeah, that sounds really cool.

Speaker 2: 1:55

I mean of all the places to end up.

Speaker 1: 1:58

I've had a very, very great relationship with the Galicia from the moment I laid eyes on it. I can remember the trip like it was yesterday the seafood, the people, the way the land looks, the feel of it. There's a very old element to Galicia and there's a very fresh element to Galicia and I think that that is sometimes lost in the wine conversation in particular. We kind of have a basic understanding of where Galicia is, what it means for the wine world. And I'd like to go further, because you're just there and you're very deeply involved in a lot of the wineries you visited, you know a lot of people, you know the Terroirs and I think that it'd be interesting to kind of dive a little deeper. So I was thinking what's great about Galicia?

Speaker 2: 2:51

What's great about Galicia? That's a. So I'm going to dive into this with the answer. The absolute thing that you need to know to understand Galicia is the Galician character. So the Galician would answer that question with it depends. That's the. A Galician will never give you a straight answer, and this is we're delving a little bit into stereotype here, but it is true. Galicia, it's not like the Spain of stereotype. It's not like the Spain that we imagine of sun, and sand and going to the beach and British people getting drunk and German tourists and all of that. That's a different part of Spain. This is Celtic inspired Spain. It's green, there's fog, there's all these brooding sailors and bagpipes and you come around the corner and there's just a cow staring you in the face, things like that. So this is green Spain, they call it. So what's great about Galicia is its ability to always surprise you. There's always something that you don't expect, and so, going back to the idea of it depends.

Speaker 2: 3:53

Galicia has been invaded. It was always the last stop, sort of, on the invasion train of Western Europe. First it was the Romans who got there. They colonized it and named it Galicia for the Galicia, the people who were living there, the sort of Celtic culture. And then, when the Romans left, there was this kingdom called the Swabians, who came in, and then it was part of the kingdom of Castilla in the medieval period and it was part of Portugal briefly, and then it was annexed into Spain.

Speaker 2: 4:21

So Galicians have this long history of always being dominated by one power, one strongman, one king, one whoever. So they'll never give you a straight answer. It's a self-defense mechanism. So if you go up to a Galician and you say you ask them a yes or no question, they'll say well, to answer that I would have to tell you about this. Or the typical joke people make is if you meet a Galician on the landing of a staircase, they won't be able to tell you whether they're going up or coming down. So that's what's great about Galicia, is that there's this potential right for surprises that you never know what's coming.

Speaker 2: 4:58

So if we relate that to the wine world, nobody 30 years ago would have said that Galicia is going to be making some of the most interesting wines of Spain. Really, why is that? I guess we have to get into a lot of history of it. Basically, to make a long story short, it's always been a deeply rural, deeply impoverished part of Spain. So people always made wine and it actually has a thousand year wine making tradition, going back to the Romans, going back to the monks it's sort of Burgundian in that style, right. And the Benedictines get there and they set up their monasteries and they set up their land and they say, wow, this is amazing, we're going to make amazing wine.

Speaker 2: 5:38

But because of the historical oppression, we'll say, of Galicia, because of its out of the wayness, it sort of went into decline after a while. I mean, there's a lot of parallels to the history of Spain. You have emigration. A lot of Galicians emigrated during the 19th century and then during the dictatorship in the 20th century. People left the countryside. They couldn't afford to feed themselves, let alone make wine, and so a lot of it fell into decline. The Tawara is there, but the people were not there. The people were not willing to do it, to stay, and so that's a great surprise They've managed to sort of claw their way back from extinction in the past 30 years.

Speaker 1: 6:17

That's fantastic. So I had a conversation with Tomor Rodriguez of Remiri and many properties all through Spain now, who's very much an ambassador for nearly forgotten places in Spain, and he was relating to me that to find the great vineyards in Galicia. A lot of it is word of mouth For sure. So there are things that maybe are nearly extinct or nearly completely forgotten and they're right there in plain sight, and you and I have had, I bet, similar experiences. Here I was, I walked through a chestnut grove. It's a terraced vineyard that's been there for a very long time. It's the Odiviso bottling of Lederis Luscio. The light hits it. You look across, you see a hermitage. I mean it's incredible and most people don't even know about it. They know maybe in the wine world we would just roll through the Appalachians. People know Northwest Spain and I think it's a really for surprise. To your point. I think there are a lot of surprises coming from Galicia.

Speaker 2: 7:27

For sure. And the great thing about exposure that we can give Galicia here in North America we'll say in the States, in the English-speaking world is that a lot of people they only know Riaspaisias, for example, or a lot of people they know a couple of wines from rebate or sacra. So with more exposure, people can say, wow, there are some really stellar wines coming out of here. But it's that idea of understanding. But I have an anecdote about that. It's like Jumanji over there, in the sense that it rains so much they get like a liter and a half of rainwater a year, which is saying something like 1,600 millimeters or whatever of or not a liter and a half I don't know what I'm talking about, but 1,600 millimeters of rain. There's a lot of rain. So the rain in Spain stays mainly in Galicia, not on the plain that's a lie. So it's extremely conducive to plant life.

Speaker 2: 8:23

So I was riding around with a winemaker in Rebater, which is arguably Galicia's oldest historical wine region that's where the Benedictines arrived. They started making wine since the 11th, 12th century and he showed me a vineyard and he said this is really sad. This man who cultivated this vineyard his whole life. He passed away during the pandemic. This is summer 2020 that we're riding around and you couldn't even see the vines Like it was completely overgrown by grasses, trees, bushes, things like that in two years, and so I'm sure that there are a lot of historical vineyards out there that, once they are abandoned, it's extremely difficult to get them back.

Speaker 1: 9:04

That's definitely true. I was walking with a winemaker and he was pointing out Incredible historic vineyard sites that he'd heard from the old folks. They're like these are the great vineyards in Ribeiro and they were complete is basically a forest, completely overgrown, and there's like Roman Edifices in there. I mean, it's crazy old and you can tell that there's something special going on them. That's. The other thing is that I feel like there's an energy in Galicia that is very different than Any other place in Spain that I've been to.

Speaker 2: 9:39

I, I chalk it up to the people like to. You know, if you go to a fair they'll say these like Celtic trinkets, and so people like to play up the Celtic nests. It's not necessarily, you know, they're not Celtic like they are in Ireland or in the British Isles. I mean, the people that were originally there were Celtic in the sense that they shared a culture. There's even evidence that there was some trade, like sea trade, between Ireland, england and the northern coast of Spain up the Bay of Biscay. But I think that energy Really sort of permeates this kind of other worldliness. The stone, the earth, the green grass, the sea, craggy Atlantic cliffs, I Think all of that sort of gives it this otherworldly energy. And also, you know, people are more open even to the idea of magic.

Speaker 2: 10:28

Culturally it's something that it's like. They get this glint in their eye, you know, when they're talking about the, the Santa Compaña, which is this procession of the dead that sometimes you can see at night and you better be careful or else they'll take you away. Or the megas, which are, like you know, witches and things like that. There's a lot of these supernatural beliefs that sort of persist to this day. Right, galicia, I mean, spain is obviously a Catholic country. The Camino de Santiago is, like you know, the third holiest pilgrimage route in the Catholic Church. The Apostle Saint James is supposed to be buried in Santiago de Compostela, right? So I mean there's obviously Catholicism there, but it sort of coexists with this idea of paganism and and magic in that sort of thing, and so Nowadays I don't think you'll find very many people who still believe in the, the megas or the Santa Compaña or whatever. But it's like culturally it still permeates and so it gives this sort of different energy, this, this that we are in Galician tell me about.

Speaker 1: 11:27

So you speak Gallego also. I do which I'm sure is very useful. Did that open doors for you? Is that, is that something culturally? Because I know that when I hear dialects in other places or distinct languages, also within countries, you start going oh, if I spoke that I'd probably Understand even more. For sure, did this open doors for you?

Speaker 2: 11:51

Oh, totally so. The other thing you need to know to understand Galicia is the existence of the Galician language. So it is, linguistically speaking, it is its own language. I think a lot of times people are misinformed, and so you'll hear them call it a dialect. Don't say that to a Galician. I didn't say that.

Speaker 1: 12:06

No, you're right, no, no no, you didn't say that.

Speaker 2: 12:08

But you know, I've had conversations where people say, oh, you speak the dialect over there and I say it's a language. It's a language. No, but I mean the Galician language comes from Latin. It's a romance language. It was originally Galego Portuguese in the Middle Ages and so it was sort of the same thing as Portuguese and the two kind of separated and Then it's been oppressed for a long time.

Speaker 2: 12:32

I mean, when Galicia became a part of Spain, castilian Spanish, castellano, they call it became the majority language and Galician was still spoken, but it was sort of associated with rural life and poverty and that kind of thing and it went through a little bit of a Renaissance in the 19th century, but then that was put on hold with the whole, you know, dictatorship for most of the 20th century, and so now it's really sad because it is something that is just so indicative of a culture having your own language, not even words or phrases or slang, but it's an entire language. So I mean language is culture, just like wine is culture, just like music is culture, languages is culture. So to understand the Galician people you need to understand that there are. You know, there is a Galician language, and that explains a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the people and their wine as well, like, for example. The one of the things that I love is that there's no tradition, or I guess that you can say yes, right, but there's the, the, the most primordial form of speaking the Galician language, which a lot of people don't do.

Speaker 2: 13:37

But if you really you go to someone who's a native Galician speaker, like you, ask them a question and they'll respond, instead of saying yes, they'll respond like in the affirmative form of the verb. So if you say like, did you go to the market, they'll say I went, instead of saying yes, you know. And so they have this sort of way of talking around things. And I think that that extends into the wine as well, because there's this instinctive understanding of place. And the other thing in in Galicia is that they have this Layer of place names that has to do with the Galician language as well.

Speaker 2: 14:11

A lot of the place names are in Galician and it's this practice of naming a thing. And you know, without getting into semantics and all of this philosophy of language and stuff, how do we understand something? We can best understand something by giving it a name, right? So if it's something. Oh, I'm just gonna describe this, but I'm not really sure it's. Oh, you know the thing about Bob the whatever. So if you go to a vineyard, for example, like Telmo has vineyards that are named, but it extends a little beyond this, and so in Galicia you have the autonomous community of Galicia and then you have four provinces within that and then with each, within each province, you have what's called a concello, which is like a township, and then within each township you have a parochia, like a parish, but there's differences between, like the religious sense of a parish and a civil parish. So it's a civil, it's a way of you know, like Denominating an area, and then within each parish, if we peel back the onion even more, you have things that are called lugares, like literally a place.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Mm-hmm and lugares can be like the church, aegrecia or outeiro the hill.

Speaker 2: 15:20

You know, in all of Galicia there's like 360 different lugares called the church, so it can be very confusing for your good man's yeah, but the idea is, because they name all of these places, they have this sort of innate understanding of where it is, where it is in relation to the other things. You know what the terroir is like if we talk about winemaking, what the climate is like. So that's what the Galician language I think brings is just the ability to understand the land, just totally intertwined.

Speaker 1: 15:50

That reminds me a bit of bass culture, too, or any strong culture, right? They name things in a very specific way, that is that it feels almost like an internal, extra part of the language where they have an Understanding. That's really cool. Let's jump into a quick break and and go back a little bit more of the. The wine side sounds good. You are listening to the Peron cast and we're back Noah, so we work together at the Maison East. I'm really I'm thankful for the whole team. It's an amazing team and I'm glad you joined.

Speaker 1: 16:29

We had a chat it's a while ago, it feels like 10 years ago but but one of the things that struck me is that you mentioned some things about Galicia in terms of wine that I'd never heard before, and I've been working with Galician wine for a very, very long time. At this point, I'm wondering if you could just give you a bit of like a two minute. I'll put you on the spot here. Oh boy, on what? Galicia? The basics of Galicia in terms of the wine regions, the major soils, where it is. Just in case someone's tuning in and they may not know anything about Galicia, sure, I'd wanna know your take as someone who's, I would consider you basically a local at this point with the way you talk about things. So let's start there.

Speaker 2: 17:19

What is Galicia? Right, galicia is, politically speaking, it's an autonomous community which is like Spain's equivalent of states or provinces. Galicia is in the northwest of Spain, so if you're looking at a map of Spain, it's in the top left-hand corner, it's the chunk right above Portugal. So if you take a look at the Portuguese border with Spain, basically, and you go to the top of Portugal and you keep going, that top left-hand corner is Galicia. We're talking about a climate that's Atlantic, mostly Atlantic, because it's surrounded on two sides by the Atlantic Ocean. You have the North Coast, which is kind of the Bay of Biscay continuing out towards the Atlantic, and then you have the Atlantic Coast, which is the western coast of Galicia or an end of Spain, all right. So Galicia's got five major wine regions. You've got the Riás Baixas, you've got Ribeiro, ribeiro Sacra, valleoras and Monterey, and I'm pronouncing this Ribeiro and Ribeiro Sacra. So whenever you see the E in the I, it makes the A sound. So Ribeiro, ribeiro Sacra, all right. So let's start with Riás Baixas, because that's the wine region that most people know.

Speaker 2: 18:25

It's most famous for the grape alboreño. Alboreño is a white grape, so alboreño can be really aromatic. It's got a lot of terpenes, which Riesling has as well. It's a chemical compound that makes it very aromatic. Alboreño actually wasn't planted there for a long time. It was kind of like the minority grape and it's sort of blown up since the Riás Baixas wine region was founded in 1988. Alboreño is with a B right Instead of the V in Portuguese because the variety comes from northern Portugal and Galicia. Alboreño from Galicia is usually a dry white wine. It's very high in acid, great with seafood. You get this sort of like lemon lime zest, this incredible salinity that they say comes from the Atlantic breezes.

Speaker 2: 19:07

A lot of the vineyards are planted in close proximity to the ocean. So that's alboreño. But now in Riás Baixas they're also making red wine. They've got all of these amazing native grapes with names like Caíno, tinto, espadeiro, sousson, all of these things. So a lot of winemakers are going back to this tradition because red grapes were the majority prior to the 1980s.

Speaker 2: 19:29

All right, so that's Riás Baixas, and within Riás Baixas you've got several different subzones. You got the Valdo Salnes, which is close to the ocean, that's. Most of the wineries in Riás Baixas are in the Valdo Salnes. A lot of the alboreño comes from there. Then you've got Ribeira da Ulla, which is north, it's sort of near Santiago de Compostela, it's inland, and this is a recent addition, post 2000. Then you've got Oro Sal, which is south, it's right on the border with Portugal. And then you've got the Condado de Tea, which is inland, and then tiny, tiny you probably won't see wines from this in the States You've got Soto Mayor, which is right near the city of Vigo. Then if we move east, we've got Ribeiro.

Speaker 2: 20:12

Ribeiro is Galicia's oldest wine region. It became a wine appellation in 1932, I believe it also has Galicia's oldest winemaking tradition. With the Christianization of the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire, after all of these Visigothic kingdoms came through, the monks of Cluny, benedictine monks, came through and they established monasteries, and so they had to grow some sort of wine. But quickly that became a means of economic influx for the monasteries, and so they started growing wine, and as Galicia's population grew it was widely considered that the wines of Ribeiro were the best wines. If anybody out there has studied Spanish or Portuguese medieval literature, maybe it's a little bit of an issue.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Everyone who's listening has studied that for sure.

Speaker 2: 21:00

Right for sure. So there's this poem called the Cantigas de Maria, by Alfonso X, who was this king of Spain and Portugal, and he mentions by name the good wine of Orense. Orense is one of the cities close to Ribeiro, so this winemaking tradition goes back a long, long time.

Speaker 1: 21:20

I wanted to ask you a question about this. The mother rock of Galicia is granite.

Speaker 2: 21:24

It is granite Galicia is a huge chunk of granite.

Speaker 1: 21:26

And so there are various. There are other soils too, of course, but there's a soil in Ribeiro that I think is mispronounced often. Could you give us the pronunciation of this soil in Ribeiro?

Speaker 2: 21:41

For sure. So in Ribeiro they have decomposed granite called sábrigo, in Ribeiro it's called shabri. The X in the Galician language makes that sh sound. So what is the same soil, decomposed granite. In Ribeiro it's called shabri and in Ribeiro it's called sábrigo.

Speaker 1: 21:59

Yeah, and you have it Going back really quickly, because I think this is a key point the seafood in Galicia. You can gloss over this, but some would argue that it's some of the greatest, if not the greatest, in the world. And I had a conversation with Gerardo Mendes at Doferrero, who is very much an aficionado, an expert. He's very particular about what he eats. He also, I believe, has a photographic memory of about everything, was telling me where he gets certain things. And then Manu was saying the same Albarino has, and a lot of the wines in Galicia have a beautiful pairing possibility with seafood. Yeah, this is just a perfect place for seafood, for sure.

Speaker 2: 22:45

This is probably. I mean, I haven't tasted all the seafood the world has to offer, but I can tell you my expert opinion is that it is the best seafood in the world. You've got these estuaries, which are basically drowned river valleys. At some point in the past the sea rose up, and so they're not like fjords of Norway. They're not as sharp in profile, they're pretty eno rolling hills that go right into the sea, but the ocean comes right in, and so all of these mussels, clams, oysters, shrimp, and so it's some of the most well nourished, best seafood in the world.

Speaker 1: 23:18

When I taste wines from Galicia, especially the white wines of Galicia, I often find myself thinking of these yeah, and it's almost like the flavor. There's a deep, almost chlorophyll salty thing on some of these wines and as you go inland there's more texture and it's really an amazing pairing. Everyone should go to Galicia Now. There's a high speed train, so it's going to be very famous. So we were talking about Rebeido. Yes, there are a lot of small parcels of land, that's. The other thing I think people miss in Galicia is that there are many, many, many owners of small, small vineyards.

Speaker 2: 24:00

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:00

And that's just what's happened. That's happened all over the. You know France as well. It's happened all over the world, Of course, but you don't find a lot of people owning a hundred contiguous hectares.

Speaker 2: 24:10

What happened is the monasteries. They owned all the property, we'll say, and just like the Napoleonic Code in France, they took church property and they auctioned it off. So the only people who could afford it were rich people. But in Galicia you've got a tradition where all of the heirs so at this point they were the male heirs, all of the heirs in a family, get the property divided up equally between all of them. So there's an anecdote that's really great, that and this is from 30 years ago, this is not from the Middle Ages but in Odense, which is kind of a rural province in the middle of Galicia, there was a man who died and he had seven children, and he had a house that had six rooms, and so they took it to court. They went to a judge and the judge ruled that six of the children could have the rooms three downstairs, three upstairs and the seventh heir got the staircase.

Speaker 2: 25:05

So this is the how it all got started, right? This is the rise of what is called the mini fundio. The mini fundio is basically a small plot. So if you imagine you know somebody farming vines in the space the size of a Manhattan studio apartment, that's what you get. And then if you take 172 of those studio apartment sized plots and give them to Gerardo Mendes, you get doferero. So for a lot of people they just farm what they have inherited or what their families have had and you know they sell those grapes. There's not a lot of people who own vast swathes of land, so it's a lot of growers who collaborate either with cooperatives or growers who, under the strict, you know watch of a winemaker, will sell their grapes to any given winery.

Speaker 1: 25:50

I think it also speaks to the kind of handmade nature of a lot of wines from Galicia. Yeah, for sure, In terms of Ribeiro, the primary grapes, I'm in love with wines from Ribeiro and I think that it's. Trissadura is an incredible grape. You find it expresses very well further south, in Monterey and in Ribeiro, along with all these other grapes and support what are the general grapes that people should know in Ribeiro besides Trissadura.

Speaker 2: 26:23

So the grape par excellence in Ribeiro is Trissadura. In Ribeiro you've got three valleys. You've got the Avia River, you've got the Migno River and you've got the Arnoia River. So in the Avia and the Migno a lot, a lot of wine is made with Trissadura. You've got another grape called Torrantes, which is not the same as the grape grown in Argentina. As Torrantes, if you go down to Arnoia there's a grape that's native to Arnoia, called Lado, and that's present. A lot of people, for example, will know the wines of Luisancho Rodriguez, so his wines have a fair amount of Lado in them as well. So you've got Trissadura, you've got Godello. There's Godello in Ribeiro as well. There's Alboreño in Ribeiro. Obviously it expresses itself differently than in Reyspeichas. And then in the red grapes you've got a lot of Mancia, because Mancia came into Galicia after Phylloxer in the 20th century and sort of spread because there was a just like there was an Alboreño craze. More recently there was a Mancia craze. So you've got Mancia. But there's other native grapes, like Sousson, like Ferron, there's Caignotinto, there's Caigno Bravo, there's Caigno Longo.

Speaker 2: 27:28

Generally, if we talk about grapes in Galicia, there's two families. There are the Eastern families and the Western families. So the Western families are like the Caigno family. Caigno is widely regarded by Ampliographers, grape geneticists, as being native to the Galicia, portugal area. And then you got grapes like Mancia and Godello that are also in the Biertho. They come from the Eastern part of Galicia and people aren't quite as sure as to where they come from. But a lot of those grapes that have come in sort of from Castileão and that kind of thing come from the Eastern part. And then the Caigno family Albarino also belongs to the Caigno family sort of just sprung up from wild vines that were growing in Galicia by the Atlantic coast.

Speaker 2: 28:10

Cool yeah. So the thing in Rebedo to remember basically, is that it's got a lot of history. It's a big chunk of granite, so a lot of these wines are going to be very vertical, sort of ethereal. But Rebedo is the transitional climate between the Atlantic climate and the continental climate, and so you're gonna have more contrast in temperature between day and night, between winter and summer. There's a lot more exposure, depending on the plots. Back at the beginning of this podcast we were talking about that. It depends, right, and I think that's really the answer for a lot of Galicia is that there's no way to make a generalization. You can say all you want about Atlantic climate and salty sea breezes and this and that and the other thing, but to really understand it you have to be on the ground and you have to talk about each individual wine. And I don't know if we have time I'll talk about the other three.

Speaker 1: 28:57

We'll keep going. I think we should. But I wanna say something just to add on about Rebedo. One thing I find as a marker is more flavor extract and a honey note For sure. And working with Amir Yoroh for years, and we're now working with a guy named Gutisejo Amixtura who is encyclopedic with his knowledge of the area, I think it's important that he is a generalization. You know, wine making does impact what's in the glass, but that's what I find with Luisancho's wines too. There's an extract, a beautiful extract in the wines.

Speaker 2: 29:35

Yeah, I think with Tracelluda you get this sort of floral honeysuckle thing that just floats over the base of the fruit and the acidity, because with granite and with Galician wines, acidity is probably the if we wanna generalize, that's probably the one thing that it all shares is this electric backbone of acidity. What about Ribeira Sacra? So Ribeira Sacra, like Ries Baichas, like Monterey, there's history there. But if we talk about the Dio, the Ribeira Sacra starts in 1996. So you got different subzones and if we break it down into its most basic components, you have two rivers. You have the River Sil and the River Migno.

Speaker 2: 30:15

So the Migno it starts in the mountains of Lugo, kind of in the middle of Galicia, in the north, and it runs south and it runs through Ribeira and it runs through Ribeyes in the Condado Tea and it runs through Oro Sal and then it ends in the Atlantic Ocean and for a lot of that it forms the border between Galicia and Portugal. But in Lugo, where the Ribeira Sacra is, it runs through this tectonic trench. We're not talking about erosion, we're talking about tectonic action. So millions of years ago there was all of these plates and they were pushing together and pulling apart and they created some serious trenches when they pull apart, and so over millions of years these rivers have filled them in and there's been some erosion, but it's not like the Grand Canyon, for example, when it was the work of erosion over millions and millions of years. What you get is these incredibly steep slopes. We're talking about degrees between 30 degrees and almost 90 degrees, so that's like a vertical, a right angle, so anywhere between 30 and 90 degrees of slope. It's pretty crazy. And then on the other side so imagine the Migno coming down then the seal joins it. So the Ribeira Sacra kind of looks like an L. The seal comes in from Castileão, located to East of Galicia, and it also filled in another tectonic trench and it also created the same kind of slopes.

Speaker 2: 31:33

And so if you look at the sloped vineyards of the world, like if we talk about the Northern Rhone or we talk about the Mosul in Germany, things like that, I mean it's the same kind of or the Dodo in Portugal, it's this stunning scenery and you think how could people possibly have arrived here, looked at this and said, okay, I can plant vines, I'm gonna make wine here, and the answer is just an incredible feat of human engineering, which is terracing. So what you do right is basically you start digging a trench in the side of the slope and with the rock and the soil that you take out of that, you build a wall until it's a terrace, and this is to prevent erosion, but it's also to give you a surface to even plant vines on, because you can't plant vines on an 86 degree slope. So the Ribena Sacra is basically that, and then if we talk about soil, it's also it forms the transition point in Galicia. So the western half of Galicia is all granitic. It's a big chunk of granite, whether it's decomposed granite, whether it's metamorphized granite. You know you get nice and that kind of rock. In the Ribena Sacra there's actually a fault line that you can see in the sub-zone of Amandi, near the town of Doade, and it's the fault line where the rock changes from granite to slate, because in the eastern part of Galicia you have slate.

Speaker 2: 32:51

So the Ribena Sacra is known for Mencia or Mencia. So Mencia is a grape that entered after Phylloxra. Phylloxra, just like in the rest of Spain and Europe, kind of devastated the regions and they had to pull up all these grapes. So Mencia was a grape that entered. It was pretty high yielding, people liked it and it sort of stuck around. But you also have native grapes like Brancelau Merenzao, which is the Galician name for trusso, so that probably entered along the Camino de Santiago. Somebody coming from France, maybe from the Jura, came and they left a sapling, a seedling of trusso, and they call it Merenzao. So you have these other blends as well. And then in white grapes we've got alberino, of course, and govello is probably the most common, but you've got other ones like Dona Branca. Galicia is a wealth of native grapes.

Speaker 1: 33:45

One of the things I'll never forget it. The first time I went to Ribeira Sacra basically no one knew what it was. This was before the Yerik Azimov article which kind of blew up Ribeira Sacra in New York and I was very sick but I knew because Andre had told me how stunning the landscape is and I just forced myself to go. I was very green, like literally my face was green To see the way the, the kind of dappled light of rbarisacra on these terraces along a river.

Speaker 2: 34:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:21

It's just incredible. There's an orange tree at the bottom of Vina, canada, that I walked down to and realized how unbelievably steep it is, and this kind of viticulture that's heroic, heroic viticulture.

Speaker 1: 34:39

Yeah, very much like. It reminded me of the Mosul in some ways in terms of steepness, but just a totally different flavor, obviously, in terms of the culture et cetera. But rbarisacra is something that people used to say. They're rustic wines People kind of drive through going to be here, yeah, and it's been amazing to see what's happened, because it wasn't that long ago that there was hardly any rbarisacra in the country.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Yeah, and, like I said, it is an invention in terms of the regulation of the DO and all of that. But the winemaking history goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and, like the rest of Eglisia, it's a story of clawing one's way back from the brink. You had a couple of pioneering winemakers who decided to go against the current of this exodus from rural areas and they said, okay, we're going to stay and we're going to make wine, and if it sells, it sells. And now it's a functioning wine region and year after year, you see more wines from rbarisacra and you see more press and people start to notice it. Now it's in wine books, for example. It's not, it doesn't merit a full page like Reyes Baishis does, but it gets a mention, and so it's really incredible how people can recover something that is on the brink of being lost, which is a great segue into Valle Horras. Valle Horras is also a story of recovery. There was a project called Revival or Revival, which stands for recuperating or recovering the vineyards of Valle Horras, Revival. So during phylloxra, a lot of native grapes were pulled up. You had a lot of plantations afterwards of Palomino actually Palomino and what the Galeasians call Garnaca tintureira, which is Alicante Bouchette. So you had those two grapes, alicante Bouchette and Palomino, and those were basically planted because they were high yielding, because people wanted to make bulk wines. People were still drinking wines. There wasn't any thought to quality. But the grape that is emblematic of Valle Horras now is Godeyo, and Godeyo was there.

Speaker 2: 36:38

Godeyo is probably, it's considered to have originated from the banks of the Seale River, whether in Biafaro or Galicia. Any good Galician worth their salt will tell you that of course Godeyo comes from Galicia. We did it first. Then those you know, those people in Biafaro stole it from us. But in the seventies there was a project that was begun by the what's called the agricultural extension, the Estacion Agraria in Spain, and there was a guy who came along, horacio Fernandes I'm getting the name wrong. If Araceli listens to this it's her father, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Horacio comes along and with help from people from the Estacion Agraria they go around and they say okay, well, you know, we need to figure out how to recover winemaking in Valle Horras, because up until then the only industry was slate mining. But not everybody could live from the mines and not everybody wanted to. So they went around and they got samples of all of the grapes, and Godeyo was the one that outperformed all of the rest. And then they did a bunch of experiments over, we'll say, 10 years and finally they figured out how to do it. And that was the start of this project called Godeval, which Jorge Ordonias first brought to the US in the nineties, early 2000s, I want to say, and that sort of kicked off this Godeyo. I don't want to say craze, but kicked off the Godeyo revolution Within Spain. People were producing Godeyo and they said, okay, well, we can do this and we can make a living from this. And now Godeyo is the grape of Valle Horras.

Speaker 1: 38:02

I noticed when I was there that, like you're saying, there is a recovery that goes beyond Godeyo. I think the flag was planted with Godeyo, but we personally work, you know, we work with wines that have much more than Godeo. So Valle Horras I think the story is still yet to be fully told. It's a place that people have a certain view via the lens of Godeyo, but there's so much the reds of Valle Horras, which are stunning. There are many wineries in the New York scene, at least, that I really respect to the make reds from Valle Horras and that's not something that would probably be brought up on a typical test.

Speaker 2: 38:44

Yeah, for sure. I mean. I'm saying all of this about Godeyo because I think it's important to know the history. But beyond that, you know, there's always going to be people who say, okay, well, what else can we do? So this is one historical grape that was recovered. But Branca Yao, which in Valle Horras was called Alvarello, was also planted there. You know People in general.

Speaker 2: 39:06

There's a historian called Xavier Castro in Galicia and he's got a great quote that said most of the history of Galicia was written shivering in the cold. So if you're in a rural area, if it rains a lot, if it's humid, you know the kind of humidity that seeps into your bones are you going to drink white wine or are you going to drink red wine. So that's the logic. So for the majority of Galicia's history it was known for red wine and people drank red wine. The only exception to this is Rebedo. That was known for white wine.

Speaker 2: 39:35

But everywhere else people planted. You know, for self-consumption people planted red wine. So Branca Yao has a long history as well, and that's yet to be written. If there's demand over here, then that will be the wind beneath the wings, because a lot of the time people say oh well, there's demand for godeo, so we're going to plant godeo, but nobody wants red wine from Galicia. It's weird. Nobody likes it. We have a duty, I think, to tell people. Well, you know, it's not just this monolithic land of white wine and oysters.

Speaker 1: 40:03

There are not many places in Spain that you can, with respect to the nature of the place, make medium weight red wines that have a lot of freshness Without a lot of intervention. I've seen it in other places, where people are just the harvest is where you get different flavors. But I think, alicia, that's one of the things that really excites me is that that's where it hasn't been told and a lot of people don't know these wines and they have that character. We I don't want to put Monterey in the corner- yeah, nobody puts Monterey in the corner.

Speaker 1: 40:35

No, it was Monterey in the corner. What's up with Monterey?

Speaker 2: 40:39

So Monterey is the Tamiga River that runs from sort of the middle of Southern Galicia down into Portugal. Monterey is very, very deeply linked to Portugal. There's a part of it that was even sort of its own independent republic, with some Portuguese towns. That's a story for another day. You can read about it, although, on winesofgalesiacom. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out it'll be live on the web.

Speaker 1: 41:04

So that's my website. If this podcast makes it to the line today, we will, yes, the wines which you've been building for quite a long time.

Speaker 2: 41:11

Yeah, so winesofgalesiacom. Monterey is a small wine region. Most people in the States don't know any wines from Monterey besides those of José Luis Mateo of Quinta de Mura de ella. There's a lot of native grapes there as well. There's Menthea there, there's Godella there, there's Dona Branca there. Monterey is basically a valley, so Monterey is a wine region. It's relatively new as well, in 96. It was also started or they began, or they gave them the official go-ahead from the Spanish government. But people have been making wine there again for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Speaker 2: 41:43

The thing with Monterey is it's the southernmost Appalachian in Galicia and so it gets a lot of heat. There's a lot of climatic contrast between the winter and summer, so you get a lot more ripeness, you get a lot more extraction. It almost seems like Castileón in its climate, but there is still Atlantic influence. So if you drink the wines of Mura de ella, for example, these are exactly what you're talking about. They're medium-bodied, they're high in acid, they've got this backbone, but they're amazing.

Speaker 2: 42:11

I love a wine maker friend of mine, manuel Castro, who is the wine maker for Vina Costeda, which maybe people have drunk as well. That's over here. He says that their wine's with a Galician accent and I absolutely love that. I think it rings totally true. One of the greatest things about the wine world is that you can drink the same grape from different places and yet it tastes completely different, whether you want to call it terroir, whether you want to call it whatever. But I think that just sums it up. They're wines with a Galician accent. You can drink Mancia from Biertel and Mancia from Monterey and Mancia from Ribella. Sacra has three different wines.

Speaker 1: 42:43

Thank you for that. That is a very much more in depth than I thought we'd get on Galicia. That's really. Thank you very much for that. And besides people meeting you on the streets working for him, he's on East. Where can they find you? What's your Instagram handle?

Speaker 2: 42:59

So, it's at nchichester C-H-I-C-H-E-S-T-E-R at nchichester, and they can check me out at winesofgalliciacom.

Speaker 1: 43:09

Great. Thank you so much for being on now.

Speaker 2: 43:10

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 43:15

Thanks for listening to the Perron Cast. I'm your host, ryan Looper. Today's episode was produced by yours truly, theme music by the Julian Tamers. Special thanks to today's guests, the teams at D'Amazon East and D'Amazon Selections and all of the growers in the D'Amazon portfolio. Remember, if you turn the bottle around, you find the Perron. It's D'Amazon. And if you have a Perron in a party, you should really share that thing. Quit hogging it. Okay, pass the Perron. If you like the podcast, you wanna find it on one of the platforms. Just search the Perron Cast, hit, follow. We got lots more to come. We're also on the Instagram at the Perron Cast. Look forward to sharing some more with you soon. Thanks.