Bodegas La Caña was founded in 2008 by pioneering Spanish wine importer Jorge Ordoñez, who was the first to introduce Rías Baixas Albariño to the US market. But the historic property dates back much farther than that. Grapes for the La Caña wines come from 62 acres of plantings spread out among 40 different small plots, most of them planted in the 1970s and ’80s.

Bodegas La Caña is located in the heart of the best subzone of Rías Baixas (the ancestral home of Albariño), Val do Salnés. Named for the salt flats that lie on the coast just below the vineyards, it is a truly coastal environment. Indeed, from many of these vineyards you can see the Atlantic ocean just a couple of miles away. The soils here are sandy, made mostly of crushed and decomposed granite, and the cool sea breezes mitigate the warm, sunny days.

The vines are trained on very tall pergolas, allowing for good airflow to combat mildew and disease, and everything is hand harvested in small baskets. Fermentation is done in steel tanks, after a 12 hour cold-soak, and aging on the lees occurs in those same tanks (75%) as well as a small portion in neutral barrels (25%)–adding additional texture and depth. The wine is bottled after eight months with a light filtration.

It’s a glistening straw-gold in the glass with greenish highlights at the rim, displaying bright aromas of salted lemon, white peach, green mango, fresh green herbs, crushed rocks, sea salt, fresh cream, and chamomile tea. Medium-bodied and racy, with an oyster shell note that calls great Chablis to mind, it also displays an ever-so-slight phenolic bitterness, like well-steeped green tea, that is classic to the Albariño grape. The pairing possibilities are practically limitless, with seafood being the logical first choice–prawns, razor clams, and on and on!