Manuel Moldes 2023 'Acios Mouros' Tinto, Rias Baixas, Spain

Rías Baixas’ geological heritage is as old as all of mainland Europe, but the wines it produces made an about face less than a century ago. Prior to the 1970s, this was red wine country, but today it’s known almost exclusively for Albariño.  The red grapes are making a comeback though. In this time in wine history there has never been a better moment to usher these wines of unique aromas, tastes and deep textures into the market. They’re extremely fresh with the shape and framing of a white wine. They often have as much acidity than some Albariños produced in the area.

The simplicity of the red winemaking follows suit with the Albariños, but involves the art of blending different grape varieties from numerous terroirs in one wine. Each red variety carries specific qualities and when tasted separately are interesting, but the blends here work. Each grape variety is so specific and the cold climate and strongly influential topsoil and bedrock types further magnify their particularities. To blend them illustrates greater clarity of the terroir as a whole rather than the grape varieties.

An embodiment of all terroir elements of the Rías Baixas, the Acios Mouros red blend rises above its grapes to express its cold and wet climate, the freshness of the forests and countryside, the ocean wind and metal and minerals found in their spare granite and schist soils. All the vineyards are located in the Val do Salnés and scattered between eight sites with varying ages, but with an average of about 40-50 years. 

Given the cold Atlantic climate, it’s almost impossible here to develop a wine of brute strength combined with extract and a fleshy body one could find in a warmer area. Here the granite soils (and to a much lesser degree, schist) lengthen the wines more vertically than round or horizontal in shape. Fruit in these wines often takes a seat further back than the first two rows dominated by extreme mineral and metal pressure.

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 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.