Areas de Rei

Areas de Rei is one of the wines Iago Garrido makes from fruit outside Ribeiro. The grapes are bought-in Doña Blanca from old vines in Infesta, a parish in the Monterrei valley (comarca of Verín), the most continental of Galicia's wine zones, south-east of the Augalevada home terraces; the label accordingly carries no DO and simply reads "Viño Branco". A long Spanish profile of the estate on the Atlantic Sommelier newsletter puts the vines at 80 to 90 years old on poor soils, a US trade text (Leon & Son) says 80-year-old vines on granite bedrock above 450 m, and the Ukrainian importer describes sandy river soils; nobody reconciles the sand with the granite, though granitic sand is the usual Galician answer. This label appears to carry on from the old Mercenario Blanco "Parcela O Balado", which the UK importer Vine Trail described as an 80-year-old south-facing sandy plot above the Alberellos river in Monterrei, mostly Doña Branca with a field-blend remainder, bought from José Luis Mateo of Quinta da Muradella; every source for Areas de Rei lists Doña Blanca alone.

Sources broadly agree on the cellar work, with one split. The Ukrainian importer and the Spanish merchants describe fermentation and roughly ten months of ageing in 500-litre oak and 600-litre chestnut barrels; the US trade text says old 500 to 600-litre French and American oak, natural fermentation at low temperature, ten months "partially under flor", unfined and unfiltered, sulphur only at bottling (the UK importer Vine Trail quotes 20 to 25 mg/l total). The flor is the house signature: Augalevada, the first Demeter-certified estate in Ribeiro, rests its wines under a thin veil of flor in its underground cellar, which the Atlantic Sommelier profile frames as Jura rather than Jerez in spirit, after drier, sharper wines. The US text is the only source that calls the veil on Areas de Rei partial. The 2023 is 12.5 percent alcohol with 0.2 g/l residual sugar per the importer, bottled as Lote 1/2023.

Monterrei-specific reporting on 2023 was not found. For Galicia as a whole, Spanish Wine Lover's harvest overview describes a year that ran against the rest of Spain: abundant rain, heavy mildew pressure after May rains, a cooler summer than 2022 in Ribeiro apart from July and August heat, botrytis in the second and third weeks of September after the autumn storms, and a regional crop up about 12 percent on 2022.