Ribeiro, Village, Viños de Encostas by Xosé Lois Sebio 2022
Tim Atkin MW 94 (2025); Tim Atkin 94 (2025)
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Why this wine
Ribeiro is one of Spain's oldest white regions and one of its least understood, and Xosé Lois Sebio farms the hard plots nobody else wants. Ten months in large oak gives this the weight of a serious white while the Atlantic keeps it taut.
At a glance
- Grape
- Albariño, Treixadura
- Region
- Galicia, Spain
- Alcohol
- 13.50%
- Body
- Full
- Acidity
- High
- Sweetness
- Dry
- Drink
- Medium (5-10 yrs)
- Pairs with
- Seafood, Poultry & Pork, Cheese
How it tastes
Floral and citrus aromas over ripe orchard fruit, with smoke and a creamy note behind them and a mineral thread that runs through the middle. Dense and full on the palate but kept balanced by high acidity, finishing long, savoury and faintly saline. Albariño and Treixadura.
The producer
Viños de Encostas is the personal project of the winemaker Xosé Lois Sebio, built on a search for wines of marked identity from awkward, neglected sites that conventional viticulture finds too expensive to farm; the wines are made with minimal intervention and low sulphur, and the stated aim is to express soil, variety and place rather than any fashion. The vineyards for this one sit at Gomariz in the municipality of Leiro, in the Avia subzone at the heart of the Ribeiro hills, several small trellised plots on the mountainside at around 250 metres, on shale and clay soils broken up and carried there by the rivers, with vines ranging from 4 to 115 years old; the local Xisto Rubio, a reddish shale, is what gives the wine its smoky, mineral cast, and a plant cover is kept to hold the soil alive while natural preparations reduce the need for treatments. Everything is worked by hand. The grapes are whole-bunch pressed, settled for 48 to 72 hours and fermented with indigenous yeasts in stainless steel at low temperature, then moved halfway through fermentation into 2,500-litre French oak foudres where the wine matures for about ten months with the lees stirred monthly for their reductive effect rather than for volume, one new barrel entering and one old one retiring each year. 2022 was one of the warmest vintages on record here, with a distinctly Mediterranean cast to it against the cooler 2021, and gave wines of fresh profile and substantial structure.
Food and drinking
Serve at 10 to 12°C, cool rather than cold, so the texture has room to show. It is a match for grilled turbot, roast chicken, pork loin with apple and a well-aged Galician cheese. Worth five to ten years in the cellar; no decanting needed, though a broad glass helps. Suitable for vegetarians and vegans.