The Galician region of Bajo Minho It is a small paradise for lovers of nature, sports and, especially, for friends of good food and drink. Located to the south of the province of Pontevedra and bordering Portugal, this region keeps the secret of one of the white wines most appreciated in the country: the O Rosal wines. In this small municipality, located in a valley very close to the point where the Miño River flows into the Atlantic, is where he founded his winery Santiago Ruizwhich many know as “the father of albariño”.
Taking advantage of the start of the harvest season, which will culminate on the second weekend of October at the Rosal Wine Fair, Directo al Paladar visits the vineyards of centuries-old vines with which the national and international projection of the wines of this subzone, one of the five that make up the Rias Baixas Denomination of Origin.
Currently, the Regulatory Council of O Rosal includes ten other wineries, including Terras Gauda, Quinta de Couselo, Altos de Torona, Valmiñor Y Winery of Fornelos. All of them produce different types of Rías Baixas wines -such as Albarino-, but only in this subzone is the elaboration of Rias Baixas Rosala multivarietal wine that is characterized by containing a minimum of 70% Albariño grapes and loureiro -in a free proportion of each grape chosen by the winery-, and that must be completed with 30% of other native white grapes (treixadura, godello Y white pipe). The mixture of all of them, added to the weather conditions of the valley and its proximity to the river and the sea, provides exceptional wines.
The emblematic label of Santiago Ruiz -the one with the manuscript map- is perhaps the one that best represents the prestige of O Rosal in the world. Maria Luisa Freire Plana, a winemaker linked to this winery since 1999, has managed to value the native varieties of the area with a complex wine in which the mineral and fruit notes and the aniseed and balsamic aromas stand out. A broth that only pairs very well with fish, shellfish and traditional dishes of Galician cuisine, but also with Asian food, rice dishes and light desserts.
How wine was made two centuries ago
In 1860, the ancestors of Santiago Ruiz founded a small family winery located in the parish San Miguel de Tabagon, in the heart of O Rosal. It was built on a 17th-century building surrounded by old trellised vineyards in the traditional Galician style: high up, to make the most of the hours of sunlight, facilitate ventilation and keep the plant away from the humidity of the soil, and supported by a characteristic system of granite pillars, linked together by wire lines, on which the vine grows and climbs.
Next to this area of vineyards, which occupies about 2,000 square metres, stands a beautiful centenary house Currently converted into a fascinating open-air museum where all the structures of pulleys, counterweights and cranks are exhibited, as well as iron and wood tools and machines with which wine was made two hundred years ago. Among other things, we can see the Galician chestnut wood presses and baskets with which the grapes were harvested in the past; a rudimentary destemmer made with iron nails, whose function was to separate the grapes from the stems of the clusters; a huge solid stone winery, where the grapes were trodden to squeeze the must, and a curious bottling machine that was powered by a cistern system very similar to that of a modern toilet. “Although it may seem incredible -explains Rosa Ruiz, the last link in this lineage of winegrowers-, this machine was used until 1989. We came to bottle 20,000 bottles with it, one by one, in the same season”.
“My great-grandfather made a very peculiar wine. It was a toasted wine with raisined grapes, which was later used for home consumption and as gifts”, he says. In the rural Galicia of that time, territorially characterized by smallholdings, wine was made following a traditional and intuitive process that had nothing to do with the technical sophistication and science of modern viticulture.
“My father continued the tradition started by his father. Neither of them were oenologists and, although my father liked wine very much, he drank very little. He loved spending the day in the vineyard and making his own wine, and he was a person full of ideas and very curious. Sometimes three hundred bottles came out, and other times only a hundred. It didn’t matter much. Most of them were given as gifts to friends and family”, points out Rosa Ruiz, who lends her name to the 100% limited edition Rías Baixas Albariño that is still made with the century-old vines from this farm. Every year about 7,000 go on sale with this label; a very small amount compared to the 300,000 bottles a year that are made of the Rías Baixas O Rosal wine that bears his father’s name.
When Santiago Ruiz retires is when he decides to create a small business to move from self-consumption to marketing. A group of acquaintances and relatives supported him in the adventure and joined as capital partners. They believed in the vision of the future of this man who, despite being over seventy years old, was already a pioneer. Ruiz was convinced that the wines from his land, which nobody knew about yet, could go very far. But he knew that to achieve this it was necessary to modernize.
“He was a very determined person,” emphasizes his daughter. For example, she called other white wine producers, like the Catalan Michael Torres, and he presented himself as a small Galician viticulturist who wanted to know where the future of wine was pointing”. This is how he ended up incorporating innovations that were still unusual at the time, such as the use of cold or the replacement of wooden barrels with stainless steel tanks. “The townspeople thought he was crazy. It was the fear of the unknown.”
At that time, in the early 1980s, the Rias Baixas Denomination of Origin, and practically no one in the world knew about this remote Pontevedra parish in which there are currently just over 900 registered people. In a few years, the place began to fill with professionals from the sector and specialized journalists. “In the 1980s there began to be a lot of talk in the media about the wines from here – Rosa confirms -. Here, due to the Atlantic influence and this microclimate in the valley, with less rain and milder temperatures than in the rest of the Rías Baixas sub-areas, and that gives these wines many peculiarities”.
The national and international projection of Santiago Ruiz began above all with the alliance with the company from La Rioja LAN Wineries. “The winery was doing very well, and it was clear that a new leap had to be taken. We had spent years complementing our production of grapes with the ones brought to us by countrymen from the area. One year they sold us a hundred different families; like each one brought only four boxes. The vineyards of San Miguel de Tabagón had already become too small for us, and a very important investment had to be made in a new winery with more spacious and comfortable facilities. My father did not have the capital to do it; that was only possible when LAN arrived”. In 2007 the new warehouse and the new vineyards, 38 hectares located in the neighboring town of Tomiño, just twelve kilometers away from the “mother house”.
The elaboration system continues to be based on the characteristics established by the Regulatory Council; namely, hand harvest. The best clusters are chosen and a second sieve is carried out on the selection table, just before the grapes arrive at the fermentation tanks. The fermentations are carried out by variety, that is, each variety is fermented separately because each variety has different ripening cycles. In this way, gaps between the ripening stages of the grapes are avoided. To give an example, the Albariño is the first variety to be harvested and the Caíño -a variety that only exists in O Rosal- is the last. After 21 days of fermentation, it is aged on the lees for three months before making the final coupage (that is, the mixture of the five varieties). And voilà, wine!
Santiago Ruiz died more than twenty years ago and, although he did not get to know the Tomiño facilities, he did confirm in his lifetime that his old intuition was correct: the wines from his land would end up conquering the world.
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