Val do Galir, Valdeorras, Godello

This is a superb wine, made from the brilliant Godello grape. With white stone-fruit, herbaceous minerality and citrus notes on the nose, it develops to a well-textured, broad, yet salt-tinged, generous white that is silky and elegant. A wine from one small plot of vines at about 700 metres above sea level, this is serious wuality for the money.

If you haven't had wine from the Godello grape before, please try one! This is a delicious example from one of the grape's homeplaces, Valdeorras, which is in the north of Spain, sitting right on top of Portugal. With apricot, yellow apple and citrus notes, this is tingling, engaging and really rewarding. Godello is amazing with food and this is not exception, only perhaps that there is plenty in this to be enjoyed on its own!

Godello is a wonderful white grape variety that is grown in the north wet of Spain. It can't quite withstand the same Atlantic battering that some of the Albarino vines take in Galicia, so it thrives better slightly further in-land in regions like Valdeorras and Bierzo. It responds well to the heat and there are some risks in handling alcohol levels, but with the right planting (at altitude) and careful vineyard management, the wines retain freshness and varietal flavours with really wonderful, balanced results.

By comparison, the Godello grape has some of the aromatic qualities of Albariño, but more of a fleshy and rewarding mouth-feel and the possibility of a touch more complexity and spice that you might think of being like Chardonnay. Of course, it is neither, but it's nice to have a hook or two!

This Godello comes from a young winery that was established in 2002 in the village of Éntoma, with 40 hectares of vineyards. They make three levels of wines: village, single-vineyard and Grand Cru, each of which have no legal meaning, it's just that they want to give reference to other great regions and some sense of classification.

This is from their  single-vineyard, or 'Pagos' level, Pagos being like the French word 'Clos'. All the grapes come from the one vineyard, called A Malosa, in the village of Entoma. The grapes are hand-picked and fermented in tanks before four months of fine lees aging, which give thew wine its wonderful texture.

The last interesting bit (well, it's interesting for us...) is that this small, provincial winery that is really very young, caught the attention of the wine world by its simple vision and the brilliant, clear and vibrant qualities of the wines that they produce. So much so that in 2017 our friends in CUNE began the process to buy the winery. And that's how we came across it ourselves! Under their guidance, the international markets have been opened and the resources needed to maintain amazing vineyards and winery facilities have been made fully available.

Their differentiation of wine levels is about place, and as Antonio Galloni notes, "Place matters, and that's why I'm so happy to see the approach taken by CVNE from Rioja after they bought Virgen del Galir". Which is nice.