Quinta da Muradella

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.