Pazo do Mar Coral do Mar Albariño 2025
£14.95
The wine
Coral do Mar is the Méndez family's Albariño, grown on slate and granite under the direct influence of the Atlantic. The sea air shows in the wine: citrus and white flowers over a saline, mineral core, with the bright acidity that makes Albariño such a natural partner for shellfish.
Albariño is Galicia's most famous grape, grown on granite close to the Atlantic in Rías Baixas and traditionally trained on high pergolas called parras that lift the fruit above damp ground. It gives stone fruit and citrus with a saline, almost salty finish, and it was made for the shellfish of this coast.
The producer
Pazo do Mar
View all Pazo do Mar winesPazo do Mar works in Galicia, in the green north-west corner of Spain where the Atlantic weather makes viticulture a quite different proposition from the rest of the country. A pazo is a Galician manor house, the traditional seat of a rural estate.
Galicia is Spain's white wine heartland and its varieties are its own. Albarino in Rias Baixas is the famous one, grown on granite close to the sea and trained on high pergolas called parras to lift the fruit above the damp ground. Inland, Ribeiro is the older region: it was exporting wine to England in the fifteenth century, long before Rias Baixas existed as an appellation, and its grape is Treixadura.
Rainfall here can exceed 1,500 millimetres a year, several times what La Mancha receives, and the challenge is fungal disease rather than drought. The wines that result are among the most distinctive whites in Spain: saline, high in acidity and built for the shellfish that the Galician coast produces in extraordinary quantity.
