Articulo en el New York Times Sobre la Ribeira Sacra

If you travel widely enough around the grape-growing regions of the world, you gather ample testimony of the driving, historic human desire to make good wine. What else could explain the compulsion to plant vines on ridiculously steep hillsides in the Mosel and the Rheingau, in the northern Rhône Valley, in Priorat and the Douro, and in Ribeira Sacra in the Galicia region of northwestern Spain?

Thousands of years before the lucrative global wine economy of today, Romans carved terraces on slopes in Ribeira Sacra that rose at precipitous angles from the rivers below. They planted vines to keep themselves supplied with wine. Over the centuries, monks expanded and maintained the network of vines, which was farmed by the church and by locals, for whom grapes were just one of many subsistence crops. It was not a matter of survival — grains and produce planted on the flats saw to that. The backbreaking labor these vines required was a matter of choice. click here to read more!