Cíes 2024 | Albariño

«The person who influenced me most was my grandfather», he says. He went with him to the vineyards from the age of twelve, and the name of his other project, Forjas del Salnés, comes from the forge that grandfather, Francisco Méndez, kept in the village.

He works the family albariño vines in Meaño, in the Val do Salnés: some were planted by his great-grandfather over a hundred years ago. With those and other plots in the concello he makes two albariños named after islands, Cíes and Sálvora.

What he is after is the albariño of before: before selected yeasts, cold fermentations, forced malolactic, corrected acidity and sulphur in steel tanks became the norm.

So he ferments with indigenous yeast and ages in old wood with no temperature control, the way it was done here until stainless steel arrived in the eighties. From that family base he has set up several projects, some of them with Raúl Pérez.

Cíes comes from vineyards between thirty and seventy years old in Meaño, at 70 metres above sea level, on granite and sandy soil. Eighty per cent of the must ferments in barrel and 20% in steel tank, and it then ages eight months in the same barrels where it fermented.