Manuel Moldes 2022 'As Dunas', Albariño , Rias Baixas, Spain

This stunning Albarino is unlike any Albarino out there and a stellar example of a terroir driven wine.  Slightly copper hues and aromas of spice and honey lead to a surprisingly fresh, elegant and savory wine with salted lemon curd, lime, guava and hints of chamomile.  This is a complex, medium bodied, textured wine wine that screams for a full spread of the best seafood dishes you can find.

Manuel Moldes is one of the rising stars in Rias Baixas, although already a preeminent producder if you ask other winemakers and sommeliers in the region.  His Albariños highlight local schist and granite sites close to the Atlantic in the Rías Baixas subzone, Val do Salnés, to illuminate the differences between these rock types in the final products.

Manuel’s approach to his Albariño range is to have wines with notable differentiating characteristics—in this case mostly influenced by the bedrock and topsoil and less in the cellar. They either contrast the soil type altogether, whether it be completely on schist, or  on granite parcels. There are also the particularities within a rock and soil type to illuminate their differences and are compelling enough to be bottled alone, like As Dunas, from sandy schist soil with no bedrock.

Manuel’s vineyards are on granite and schist bedrock, with topsoils of the decomposed bedrock with varying grain sizes, from talc-like fine sands to loamy mixtures of clay and sand. The granite bedrock is old and extremely friable and, like the schist bedrock sites, is crushable in one’s hand—at least from what’s found on the surface.

As Dunas, a single plot, is the name given for the unusually fine grain of the metal and mineral-rich talc-like schist derived sands found in this site. The tiny parcel is shared equally between Moldes and two Galician wine luminaries, Rodrigo Mendes and Raul Perez. Manuel claims there are notes within this wine that are completely unique to this site and found nowhere else—that they know of—where Albariño is grown in Galicia.

Fermentation and aging of Manuel’s wines take place in a mixture of mostly old 500-to-700-liter French oak barrels. After nine to eleven months, they are bottled. The lengthy time in barrel, as opposed to the more regional norm of five to six months, allows some of the primary fruit qualities of the grape to peel away, making room for more of the unique individual nuances to more firmly declare themselves.