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Rías Baixas is probably Galicia’s best-known Denominación de Origen (DO). It’s located in the province of Pontevedra and part of southern Coruña in the south and west of Galicia, and it’s one of the five DOs that you’ll find in Galicia.

Rías Baixas has around 4,000 hectares of vineyards. When you consider that Spain has around 950,000 hectares of vineyards in total, you can see that Rías Baixas is a very small region. And individual holdings are small as well - often no more than a hectare and split between 3 or 4 small plots. The result is thousands of small growers and producers, making some wonderful artisanal wines.

This DO is most famous for the white Albariño grape which makes up around 90% of plantings and which produces wonderfully crisp and fragrant white wines. But there are other grapes grown here – including some reds like Caiño Tinto, Espadeiro, Mencía and Sousón.

Albariño is a white wine grape grown in the northwest corner of Spain and in northern Portugal. And within Galicia it’s most commonly found in the region of Rías Baixas, where the temperate, humid climate provide perfect growing conditions for this grape.

Albariño produces quite a lot of natural sugar but it also retains its acidity which means the wines stay crisp and fresh. On the nose you get floral sensations, often with a hint of honeysuckle. But that combines with a nice clean citrus streak coming through, and sometimes a slight saline note on the top.

And that carries through when you taste the wine. You get the lime, and other citrus flavours like grapefruit. But you also get softer, sweeter fruit like summer peach. Again, it’s that nice mix of floral fruitiness cut with clean, fresh citrus flavours that really make wines from this grape beautiful to drink.

Half Italian, half Galician, Benedetto Carcieri has spent a lot of his working life travelling Spain and the world selling wines from Galicia, specifically from Denominación de Origen Ribeiro. Like many of his colleagues in the wine trade, all that energy and enthusiasm spent selling wine led him one day to the conclusion that the next logical step was to make his own wine.

Starting with just a few hectares of his own, Benedetto and the Atlantic Galician Wineries project has slowly expanded and now encompasses three of Galicia’s most celebrated appellations: the well-known coastal region of Rías Baixas, home of the Albariño grape, the dramatic terraced landscapes of Ribeira Sacra along the Sil and Miño rivers, and Ribeiro, famous for its centuries-old winemaking traditions and wonderful native white grapes like Treixadura, Torrontés or Godello.

Following a manual harvest, the grapes arrive at the winery where they are de-stemmed, and the so-called free-run juice is extracted naturally from the grapes (i.e. no mechanical pressing is involved), and left to clarify naturally for 36 hours at 10ºC. Temperature-controlled fermentation then takes place in stainless steel tanks at 14ºC for 21 days. Once fermented, the wine remains on its lees in the tanks until it is stabilized and bottled.