Rafael Palacios

Rafael Palacios started his own project in 2004, in the Val do Bibei in the municipality of O Bolo, in the province of Ourense, inland Galicia. It is part of the D.O. Valdeorras, and at the time it was very nearly a lost cause. Steep, awkward country, poor soils that give tiny crops, phylloxera and then the depression of the 1920s had between them driven most of the growers out. What was left was a scatter of old terraced parcels going quietly back to scrub. Palacios spent his first years buying them from the old men who still held them.

Those little terraced plots have a name in Galician: a sorte, meaning a lot, because they were traditionally handed down by drawing lots, a sorteo. That is where the name of his top wine, As Sortes, comes from, and it tells you most of what you need to know about how this place was farmed.

He works with one grape, Godello, and nothing else. There are now thirty-two plots totalling twenty-four and a half hectares, all on the right bank of the river Bibei between six hundred and twenty and seven hundred and forty metres of altitude, which makes O Bolo the highest municipality in the region. The soils are pure granite sand, formed by the rock itself breaking down, with quartz schist through it: infertile, acidic and easily washed away. The climate is continental with an Atlantic influence, so there is real diurnal swing and a long growing season. Palacios oversees both the vineyards and the winemaking himself, uses organic treatments, works the biodynamic calendar in the top vineyards, and has brought back horse work and specially adapted light machinery to keep the terrace walls intact rather than tearing them up with a tractor.

The point of all this is not romance. Godello grown this way, at this altitude, on this rock, produces white wine of a texture and a saline mineral drive that very little else in Spain can match, and it is the reason Valdeorras went from a footnote to one of the two or three most talked-about white wine regions in the country in about twenty years. Palacios did not do that on his own, but he is the name most closely associated with it. Guia Penin has scored As Sortes 94 or above in every vintage since 2004, and Jancis Robinson, Decanter, The Wine Advocate and James Suckling have all rated it in the high nineties or their equivalent.

Louro do Bolo comes from parcels averaging twenty-five years old above six hundred metres, and it is a precise, saline, immediately drinkable white that punches a long way above its price. As Sortes comes from six old sortes at over six hundred and eighty metres and is one of the finest white wines made in Spain.

Above both sits a third wine, Sorte O Soro, a single-parcel bottling made in very small quantity and very hard to get.