A benchmark of the Ribeira Sacra wine region, Fernando González has been making wine since 1979, when he fell in love with a vineyard belonging to his wife Ana Delia Pérez’s family. He named the first wine after his wife’s family home: Casa Algueira, which in the Galician language means “the place where friends gather to enjoy.” Casa Algueira eventually became Adega Algueira and was one of the founding wineries of DO Ribeira Sacra in 1996. Fernando later joined forces with renowned Spanish winemaker Raúl Pérez to continue refining the winemaking, and added wines made from traditional grapes like merenzao and brancellao to the lineup.

Fernando’s son Fabio joined the family business in the 2010s, and is gradually taking over from his father. Today they farm about 25 hectares of vineyards, divided into over 80 plots of different sizes, orientations and soils that they have painstakingly recovered from abandonment and neglect. Though not officially certified, they use organic and biodynamic methods in the vineyard, where all farming is done by hand since the steep slopes of Ribeira Sacra don’t allow for mechanization in the vineyard.

Gerardo Méndez was part of the original group of 14 pioneering growers who formed the Denominación de Origen Rías Baixas in 1988. Originally from a family of blacksmiths (Ferreiro = blacksmith in the Galician language), he named his now-iconic wine Do Ferreiro, “From the Blacksmith.” Gerardo made his first wine in 1973, and the first vintage-labeled wine in 1986. The Méndez family home is located in Meaño, facing the Ría de Arousa in the Val do Salnés subzone of DO Rías Baixas.

Directly in front of the house is the 200-plus year-old, pre-phylloxera Cepas Vellas (Old Vines) vineyard, home to the oldest documented Albariño vines in Rías Baixas. This vineyard yields the eponymous cuvée that has become a defining expression of complex Albariño that can improve with age over a long period of time.

In 2015, Gerardo’s son Manuel Méndez took over as winemaker from his father, and daughter Encarna is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the winery. Since Gerardo’s children have been at the helm of the project, they've expanded the winery’s offerings to single-vineyard and single-soil-type wines.

Across the range, the wines display a distinct saline minerality and purity of fruit that showcases the terroir expressions from the various sites on the estate. The flagship Cepas Vellas is dense and structured, and one of the region's most age-worthy examples of the grape.

Luis Anxo Rodríguez Vázquez, or simply Luis Anxo, as he’s known to everyone, is one of a small group of winemakers responsible for the quality renaissance of the Ribeiro wine region. He farms 222 plots that make up an area less than 6 hectares, with a production of about 30,000 liters of wine per year. Working out of a small winery in Arnoia, tucked away in Galicia’s Ribeiro wine region, he has become a champion of Galicia’s native grapes and a model of quality winemaking to follow.

After a childhood spent helping in the family winery, he went to school for law, but later changed to philosophy, and then studied oenology in Madrid. In 1984, he took over the family business and planted his first vineyard. Later, he began to piece together other plots by renting or buying them from neighbors, pulling up palomino and garnacha, and replanting them to native varieties like treixadura and lado. His wines quickly established him as a reference point for quality in a region that at the time was dominated by cheap, bulk white and red wines.

Luis Anxo produces serious, age-worthy wines with structure and purity. The best are tight and mineral in their youth, blooming after several years of bottle age into some of the most beguiling wines of the appellation.

Pazo de Señorans has become synonymous both with high-quality wines made from the Albariño grape and with Albariño’s ability to age for decades. In 1979, Marisol Bueno and Javier Mareque purchased a 16th-century manor house known as a “pazo” in the Galician language. They recognized the potential of the Albariño grapes growing on the estate and elsewhere in the region, and Marisol became instrumental in uniting growers to the cause of the burgeoning DO Rías Baixas. In 1986, she became the wine region’s first president.

Second-generation Vicky Mareque Bueno is now in charge of the estate, with founding winemaker Ana Quintela still in the cellar. Though Pazo de Señorans has made a name for itself producing top-tier, consistently great Albariño from year to year, the winery has also become known for its ‘Selección de Añada’. Made from a single vineyard, kept in tank on its lees for 30 months, and aged in bottle for at least an additional year, Selección de Añada has become a benchmark for aged Albariño in Rías Baixas, showing taut minerality, huge intensity with an incredible density and concentration of fruit.

Although wines from Rías Baixas, Ribeira Sacra, and Valdeorras get all the spotlight, one of Galicia’s greatest growers and winemakers is located in its smallest wine region, Monterrei. In an unassuming concrete building in Verín, only a few miles from the Portuguese border, José Luis Mateo crafts some of Galicia’s most transcendent wines that have rightly taken on a cult following.

After spending most of his upbringing in a family vineyard making wine for their tavern, José Luis went to Madrid for a brief stint at university, but quickly quit and returned to Verín. Over time, his wines became known in Galicia and all over Spain as examples of soulful expressions of the marriage between native grapes and terroir.

He farms an array of plots from 300 to 700 meters of elevation, each with their own soils that shift across a single vineyard, the result of millions of years of geological upheaval. A relentless perfectionist, he strives to create the ideal combination of grape variety, parcel, aging vessel, and winemaking techniques to fully express Monterrei in the glass. While his entry-level Candea wines are already benchmark in Monterrei, his upper echelon would be at ease on a table with the best the rest of the world has to offer.

Rafael ‘Rafa’ Palacios makes finely-crafted, sinewy wines defined by granitic soils and old, low-yielding vines that have put Godello from Valdeorras on the global map. He combines traditional methods in the vineyard with modern techniques in the winery to make wines that express the unique terroir of Valdeorras and the singular greatness of the Godello grape.

After growing up in the family winery in Rioja, he followed in the footsteps of his brother Álvaro and struck out on his own, eventually settling in Valdeorras and purchasing vineyards in the south of the appellation, near O Bolo. He’s been making wine in Valdeorras since 2004, but rocketed to even more fame when his ‘Sorte O Soro’ became the first Galician white wine to get a perfect 100 point score from Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate in 2020.

Palacios farms around 32 hectares using organic and biodynamic practices. His entry-level Louro comes from several terraced parcels planted in granite amphitheaters near O Bolo. The flagship wine, As Sortes, is sourced from very old Godello vines and showcases the variety’s incredible aging potential and elegance, while the single-parcel Sorte O Soro is widely considered the summit of what this grape can achieve.