The last of the Mohicans of the Ribeira Sacra: within the most difficult vineyards to harvest in the world
Sindo Díaz González is 69 years old and still patrols the vineyard up and down the terrace at 280 meters high on an almost vertical wall, with astonishing agility, carrying boxes of Mencia grapes above his Mohican crest.. He has harvested all his life on the family farm with donkeys and sacks, but he was around 40 when he decided to clear the forest and revive the vineyard that was below at the intersection of the Sil and Edo rivers, which he expanded in little pieces until totaling three hectares..
“I had the illusion of making a Vega Sicilia (from the Ribeira Sacra) here,” he says, perched on a cliff, where he complains about the hardness of manual work in full sun for weeks that no one wants to take on anymore.. Among the 25 workers on the crew there are many older women with quick hands and tanned skin who walk through narrow furrows cutting one bunch after another for eight hours.. They are around 50 and 60 and the vertigo stayed at home. They do not stop to talk nor do they like to be interrupted. They do what they know, what they have come to do and that no one else does. “There is no labor. “No one wants to come to the area anymore,” laments Díaz, the last Mohican of the Ribeira Sacra.
Recognize that from spring to autumn, the vines give no respite and the work intensifies: sulfating, wiring, branching and harvesting is very hard.. Everything is manual and even bringing the Jeep closer to load the grapes is a feat. A few meters away, Óscar is the (only) exception. A kid from the region who dares to climb up and down slopes with a gradient that exceeds 65%. Ascend from the riverbed to 530 meters, where the highest vineyard is and enjoy learning an ancient trade where climate change is also having its impact, raising temperatures and anticipating the harvest so that the sun does not burn the clusters and turn them into raisins. And it happens even though they accelerate the deadlines to avoid it.
From the Sindo estate comes Bancales Olvidados, a unique wine, 100% Mencía, macerated and fermented in French oak, which is one of the standards of the Ponte da Boga winery, the oenological commitment of the Hijos de Rivera Corporation, the group behind the brands of Estrella Galicia, Cabreiroá, Maeloc or Auara. Founded in 1898 by the Pascasio Fernández family in Castro Caldelas (Ourense), it is the oldest winery in the Ribeira Sacra and passed into the hands of the Riveras in 2006 with a personal commitment by José María Rivera to do an origin and production project. in value of an ancient tradition that has sculpted an entire region by and for wine.
The Ribeira Sacra is a territory straddling three river basins (Miño, Sil and Cabe) and 27 municipalities in two provinces, Lugo (13) and Ourense (14).. Biosphere Reserve, nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status and is a paradise on earth. The best vineyards were buried by the dams that dammed the Sil River in Santo Estevo and San Pedro during the Franco regime and only a quarter (1,200 hectares) of the 5,000 possible hectares are cultivated, the winery explains.. Terraces carved over a century by order of the monasteries on shale and hidden under a blanket of disordered vegetation that covered abandoned vines due to the impossibility of harvesting them..
The heroic thing, says Rubén Pérez, winemaker at Ponte da Boga, is “putting that landscape in a bottle” and assuming a cost that multiplies by six that of the harvest in other Iberian territories.. “We are around 3 euros per kilo of grapes compared to 0.50 in other regions”. Often, removing the clusters from the vineyard requires a harness to hold on, rails to lift the boxes as in vertical mining, or boats to load them in the river and dock them on land..
Vineyard climate change
If we rewind, it was the Romans who introduced wine by searching for gold in Ourense – a place name that would derive from Auriense (city of gold) but the credit goes to the monks who, since the 8th century, sculpted the slopes of a stone canyon – schists – where it was unlikely to grow anything else to make a rare, wild and vertical wine. The plague of phylloxera and powdery mildew that wiped out vines from all over Europe ended up in the Ribeira Sacra, but, with time and care, indigenous and very unique grapes such as mencía, merenzao -la bastarda grape-, whitenellao or sousón (reds) and godello , treixadura the legitimate whites (blancas) managed to survive.
Today the threat is different. Climate change is in the vines and cherry trees that bloom in February. An example: if a decade ago the harvest began at the beginning of October, this 2023 it started at the beginning of September. Even the end of August for the white grapes, they point out from the Castro Caldelas winery, which turns 125 years old. “Climate change is moving faster than us. The viticulture that we learned to do for centuries is no longer useful. We see it every day; There are grapes that resist better (sousón) than others (merenzao) and we strive to adapt quickly, but it is not enough,” points out its winemaker..
The other challenge is to apply the circular economy: reuse water to clean vats, sterilize with steam and apply ozone as a mitigant within the Aromavid project that the winery is developing together with the University of Santiago and the CSIC, in addition to using thermoreactive labels that reveal a map when the temperature is optimal for consumption. From Ponte da Boga, in the DO Ribeira Sacra, 450,000 bottles of a unique wine come out annually in its different versions: Capricho de Merenzao, Porto de Lobos, G, Pizarras y Esquistos,…. for the domestic market and a relevant percentage that is already exported to Anglo-Saxon markets, mainly Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where the critic Eric Asimov helped popularize Mencía and the white wines of this wine-growing region of Ourense in the pages from the New York Times where in 2009 he proclaimed himself a devotee of this terroir between rivers where passion and landscape combine in a heroic wine.