The setting was magical, steep terraces plunging to the River Miño below. But José Moure was hard-headed about the challenges: “We’re in crisis – the big buyers bought very few grapes in 2023 and 2024,” said the winemaker at Abadia da Cova, in Ribeira Sacra. “It’s the crisis in the red wine market, post Covid.”

Those hard facts in this majority-red corner of Galicia are a microcosm of new figures from international wine body, the OIV. Its first 2025 estimates show that although global wine production rose slightly – last year’s total was the lowest since 1961 – output is still well below average thanks to climate change-driven bad weather. Meanwhile consumption is falling – especially of red. Between 2004 and 2021, red wine production plunged by a quarter. It now makes up just over two out of every five bottles of wine produced.

In Spain, domestic wine consumption is low – just ahead of the UK – with red sales falling gently. President Trump’s 15% tariffs look certain to dent demand. Meanwhile changes to UK alcohol duty have hit red exports hardest, since they tend to have higher ABVs. The first four months of this year saw a 7.5% drop in the value of Spanish exports to the UK, led by bulk reds and deepest in Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia, Rioja and Aragón.

So winemakers need a plan. But traveling in Galicia and León this month, I was struck by the range of responses to these market realities.

In Valdeorras in the 1970s, up to 90% of production was red and of low quality. The authorities’ response was far sighted: “REVIVAL” – the Valdeorras Vineyard Restructuring Plan – rescued the near-extinct Godello grape and promoted its planting. That effort got a boost with the appearance in the region of Priorat star Álvaro Palacios and later, in Valdeorras, his nephew Ricardo. In the past 20 years, Godello plantings in Valdeorras more than tripled: 82% of production is now white, and 75% Godello.

This success has drawn the attention of Spanish producers keen to expand their white portfolios. While the scale of outside investment hasn’t yet reached the gold-rush proportions present in Rias Baixas, it is significant. In 2014, Ribera del Duero producer Pago de los Capellanes launched its O Luar do Sil brand in Valdeorras. Production is now 450,000 bottles a year, though winemaker David Pascual told me that they are still struggling to keep up with demand. Meanwhile since 2018, Rioja giant CVNE has operated Virgen del Galir, now making around 200,000 bottles a year. And last month Zamora, owners of Rioja’s Ramón Bilbao, acquired a majority stake in Bodegas Godeval, a leading Valdeorras producer.

Is it sustainable? Luis Peique, winemaker at Adega o Cabalin warns, “Godello is a bubble now,” with production driven in part by newer, more productive clones. Peique and his wife, Teresa López, take a very different approach – and not just because most of their wines are red. They grow grapes in 48 high-altitude parcels of old vines strung across just 3.5 hectares, making only around 8,500 bottles a year. But while some Godello-focussed producers are now also making single-vineyard wines, such as Valdesil’s Pedrouzos from a 150-year-old plot, the DO has shown little interest in privileging these unique parajes (“places”, ie lieux-dits).

Yet that is precisely the approach embraced by neighbouring Bierzo, just inside León province. Over 70% of its wines are red, almost all from Mencía. And in 2017, following a huge mapping and classification exercise, the DO embraced a very Burgundian system of quality tiers. Straight DO Bierzo (like AOC Bourgogne) can be from anywhere in the appellation. Vino de Villa (village wine) can be labelled with the village or district it’s from. Then there are 1,500 recognised parajes that can appear on the labels of single-vineyard wines.

Meanwhile Ribeira Sacra has begun a similar mapping process to move to a paraje system. DO President Antonio Lombardía says, “We must first clearly explain our unique identity based on heroic viticulture, and then work on developing this trend in the red wines we produce here: light, vibrant, fruity wines that the new consumer demands.”

Will this approach work? “I think it strengthens interest in the wines of this small DO,” says Silvia Marrao, owner and winemaker of Banzao. “It’s a recent project that will need time to consolidate, but I think the DO is on the right track.”

Certainly Bierzo is producing some serious wines, reflecting its old vines and diverse terroir. In that respect it is ripe for “Burgundianisation”, as Guy Woodward called the trend on this site recently. In part, at the higher end, this is a strategy of premiumisation – except that these wines have far more of a sense of place and history than, for instance, most of their north American premium peers. Whether it can help the DO as a whole weather changing consumer tastes remains to be seen.

But whichever route they take, at least appellations like Valdeorras, Bierzo and Ribeira Sacra have strategies aimed squarely at tackling market challenges. That’s more than can be said for a slew of Spanish DOs still churning out co-op-dominated big reds. In Penedès, Catalan expert Fintan Kerr reports that a large percentage of new plantings are white, though no thanks to any DO efforts.

By extension, there’s the same stasis in those denominaciones’ equivalents in France and Italy. In France some appellations stand out for their far-sightedness: witness AOC Côtes de Provence’s rosé-base strategy over the past two decades. Workaday Languedoc AOCs? Not so much.

Purists might claim that such marketing-oriented strategies ride roughshod over tradition. But wine is always in flux, and indeed the development of appellation systems and associated rules were themselves an innovation when they first appeared from the 1930s. Still, if you adopt a Burgundianisation strategy, the wines had better be good – and you’d better have a compelling story to tell.

Photo by Ed Leszczynskl on Unsplash

Andrew Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/. His new book with Jane Masters MW, Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, is published by the Académie du Vin Library.