Rías Baixas
My first visit to Galicia a decade ago was on a wine trip. Or so I had been led to believe. The invitation had come from the Rías Baixas regional consejo, after all, and, as I leafed through the schedule over breakfast on my first day, I found a list of producers’ addresses that, put together, charted a mazy course around the fjords, estuaries and wide beaches of the home of Albariño.
But the first stop of the week was not a winery or a vineyard or a tasting room. Our hosts had instead decided to collect us from our hotel in the centre of the estuary town of Pontevedra and take us on a short stroll to the Lérez river waterfront to visit the Mercado de Abastos local central market.
It’s a pleasant if scarcely spectacular building, a large, light and airy two-storey construction of columns and arches in the local granite stone entirely rebuilt in the early 2000s. But once we’d stepped inside we soon grasped that our hosts’ reason for bringing us there wasn’t to admire the architecture. If your mission was to get people to understand why the great modern white wines of Rías Baixas taste and feel the way they do, here was a significant, overwhelmingly sensual part of the explanation. Stall after stall piled up with the fruits of the Atlantic ocean that crashes into Galicia’s 1,000km-plus of craggy coastline, a parade of creatures from every corner of Jules Verne’s imagination, the air dense and damp with iodine, salt and the melodious calls of the stallholders.
If Galicia’s costa del marisco (seafood coast), is a seafood-lover’s spiritual retreat, then the region’s markets are its churches, places where you can marvel at and worship the marine abundance. Hake, tuna, mackerel and octopus brought from the ocean to Europe’s largest fishing port in Vigo; crabs, mussels, scallops, and – most distinctive and challenging of all – the livid red, intensely iodine-flavoured percebes barnacles foraged by divers who scrape them from the rocks in wave-lashed rocky coves.
And as I soon discovered, the white wines that are the essence of the Rías Baixas DO are the very definition of
