Located in the Galician region of Rías Baixas, on the northwestern coast of Spain, down in the Salnés valley, and neighboring Cambado, the heart of albariño, Constantina Sotelo is a family-owned micro-project whose origins date back from the 18th century. Throughout the generations, the family has always made wine for its own consumption and also to sell to local residents until eventually, in 1999, with the creation of the label “Constantina Sotelo,” the wines became available to the lovers of genuine, traditionally distinctive Galician wines.
It is not an easy task for Sotelo to recreate the way her ancestors used to make wine, since the biological cycle of the vineyards is nowadays very different; the inevitable change of the timing and techniques of pruning and tying of the vines, as well as the readjustment of their fallow system (vineyards are only allowed to recover on certain winters), has indeed affected the whole ecosystem. As such, Sotelo’s vineyards are “as savage as their climate,” which sparks off a constant and tenacious fight in order to avoid mildew and other diseases of the grapevines.
In the cellar, or better, in the micro-cellar, all the vinification process is finally rewarded. Wine is made in a totally natural way – nothis is added, nothing is taking away –, and fermentation and ageing occur in chestnut and oak barrels, stainless steel tanks, concrete and terracotta eggs, amphorae, and demijohns. Here there’s no limits for Sotelo’s creative expression, regardless of the future commercial fortune of the wine or the opinion of any DO’s tasting panel, because her goal is to craft wines that are trully the expression of their terroir, and so each wine is a unique, unparalleled piece, that may be found scattered around the world on the wine lists of prestigious restaurants and wine bars, famous for the support of natural wines.
