We’re in luck with the 2025 vintage:
an excellent vintage, with a good-sized crop too.
In fact, this is the very first time I’ve been able to dedicate a newsletter to this wine! In previous years, it always sold out straight away.
When I suggested writing about this wine yesterday, I immediately found some fans here at the office: apparently, this wine has quite a few female admirers 😉…
Which wine?
Another wine from our friend
Rodri Méndez of the
Forjas del Salnés estate in Rías Baixas.
The white wine in question is
Leirana Genoveva 2025.
100% Albariño from granite soils, from a vineyard with
vines over 100 years old. Fermented and aged in large 2,500-litre wooden foudres. Just over 5,000 bottles produced in 2025. A
beautifully ripe vintage with plenty of fullness, yet always with a mineral undertone. Perfect acidity and balance, with plenty of complexity and length.
Just the right amount of weight from fermentation in oak and its terroir.
This 2025 has not yet been scored, but the last vintage reviewed was the 2023, which immediately earned a fantastic 97/100, one of the highest scores ever awarded to a Spanish white wine!
Leirana, Genoveva 2023: 97/100
“The 2023 Leirana Finca Genoveva deserves the best treatment: a wide Burgundy glass and plenty of time and patience. This is a very serious white that transcends variety and vintage, from a very special place, a centenary vineyard that transmits the strict and serious character of the granite soils like few others. The wine fermented and matured in well-seasoned, neutral 2,500-liter oak foudres with the lees untouched for one year. This is always closed, ungiving and austere at first and when young, but it's also precise, symmetric and full of energy rather than weight. It has very balanced parameters: 12.55% alcohol, a pH of 3.29 and 7.14 grams of acidity. 5,000 bottles were filled in September 2024. At Forjas del Salnés, they have fermented their 2024s in their new winery in Meaño. They have 12 hectares of vineyards in Meaño, Ribadumia, Sanxenxo, Cambados and Barro and produce 130,000 bottles with the help of Raúl Pérez, with whom they also produce some wines. For them, 2023 was a year of contrasts, with rainfall exceeding 2,000 liters, something that hadn't happened for a decade. However, it was also a year of abundant sunshine, with more than 2,300 hours of sunshine recorded, the second highest ever. July was colder and wetter than normal, with an average temperature three degrees lower than in 2022. The wines are certainly fresher than those from 2022. 2024 was warm and humid, with above-average temperatures and abundant rainfall. The winter was very warm, with above-average temperatures, and the summer also saw high temperatures and a marine heat wave. Rainfall was above average, especially in autumn. But the result is superb. Rodrigo Méndez said, "It’s the finest vintage for me since 2010. It’s rare to find such balance between ripeness and acidity; usually when we have more ripeness, the acidity drops, and in years of less ripeness, the acidity goes up. In 2024, we found a perfect balance.” The wines are vibrant and fresh, with marked salinity in the finish. “For the reds, it’s a different story; the red grapes need warm years. 2022 was perfect after a dismissal 2021. 2023 was not bad, and 2024 is more variable, not homogeneous.”