Cume do Avia

East of Spain’s Rías Baixas lies the Ribeiro D.O., one of the country’s most historic wine regions internationally known for both red and white wines for nearly a thousand years. Here, a band of idealistic young brothers and cousins left city life to reclaim their family’s abandoned land, Eida de Mouro, and recapture their family’s ancient history. Their label, Cume do Avia, began nearly two decades ago, and their geologically complex mountainside vineyards are composed of granodiorite, schist, slate, and gneiss bedrock, clay and sand topsoil, and have nearly twenty indigenous grape varieties planted with ancient massale selections and overlook the Avia and Miño Rivers. They bottle single variety and blended wines of intense freshness, detail, and authenticity, with the reds led by the graceful queen of Galician red grapes, Brancellao, along with the unstoppably vigorous Caíño Longo, and the ink-black and deliciously savage Sousón. Their whites are led by soft Treixadura, with a supporting cast of high-acid varieties, like Albariño, Lado, and Loureiro.