We’d been dying to return to Spain’s Galician coast for some time, so our visit in early 2023 could not come soon enough. It did not disappoint. Tim Atkin MW, who knows these estuaries and inlets well, recently wrote that Rías Baixas is “one of the most exciting areas in Europe right now.” After spending just a few days in the region, visiting ten producers, it’s hard to disagree. When we first visited the area, the real power was in the hands of a small group of large negociant-producers: a seaside Rioja on a micro-scale. Those producers are still very much on the scene and, for the most part, making ever more characterful and interesting wines. Today, scores of small, terroir-focused independent projects have entered the picture, bringing a wealth of energy, innovation, and a progressive, low-intervention ideology to the farming and the region’s star variety, Albariño. Rosa Ruiz’s father was responsible for the creation of the Rías Baixas D.O., selling his first twenty boxes of estate-bottled Vino de El Rosal to a restaurant in Vigo in 1981. Beaming with pride, Rosa took us to the original 17th-century winery in San Miguel de Tabagón, where she maintains a tiny museum containing the rudimentary equipment that her father used to craft his early vintages. Times have changed. In 2007, the estate moved up the road to Tomiño, where talented Galician-born winemaker Luisa Freire keeps this pioneering estate bang up to date with her juicy, granite-influenced wines. About half an hour’s drive from one of the oldest properties in Rías Baixas, is one of its newest. Pentecostés winemaker Jorge Marcote is making electric wines from terraced vineyards nestled among the lush Atlantic forests of the Miñor Valley. Marcote is emblematic of the young, instinct-driven winemakers shifting the dial in Rías Baixas. Natural yeast fermentation, skin contact and oak barrels are all part of his toolbox, resulting in striking, salty-steely, food-friendly whites that go toe-to-toe with Europe’s best. His passion for less-known varieties is also well-founded: Pentecostés’s blended wine is arguably even more exhilarating than its straight Albariño.