Green Spain: the drowned river valleys — the rías — of southern Galicia are a country of eucalyptus, pine and Atlantic rain, more than 1,600 millimetres a year. Against the damp, vines have long been trained high on pergolas of granite posts, the breeze drying the fruit above head height, and ownership remains a minifundio of thousands of small family plots.
The denominación de origen dates only from 1988, and the transformation since has been remarkable: Albariño, long a local curiosity poured in the taverns of Cambados, has become Spain's flagship white, saline and citrus-edged, grown on the decomposed granite the Galicians call xabre — and the model that drew Atlantic Spain back toward its own grapes.