Adega Sernande is a project born of the friendship between Ribeira Sacra natives María Aira Pumar and Antonio López Casas and Gredos vigneron Orly Lumbreras. The trio met at a natural wine event in Galicia where Orly was showing his wines, kept in touch, became good friends, and eventually succeeded in launching an incredible project together. Orly has a strong connection to Galicia, having spent a formative decade living in Santiago de Compostela before moving with his young family to Madrid, where he discovered the world of natural wine. After working alongside Alfredo Maestro in the austere mountain village of Navarredondilla, Orly fell in love with Grenache and the Sierra de Gredos and decided to pursue a second career in winemaking (he is a sound engineer by training). Orly admits, however, to obsessing over Galicia’s intense landscapes as he developed his point of view as a winemaker; he yearned to interpret the Ribeira Sacra’s characterful local varieties. In 2014, when María and Antonio invited him to make a wine together from their vertiginous parcel of Mencía on the edge of the River Sil, he jumped at the chance. The project takes its name from the village of Sernande, where the trio built out a small winery in an old stone house in time for the 2018 vintage. The heart of Adega Sernande is the historic winemaking village of Vilachá de Salvadur, home to an epic panorama of slate and schist terraces of vines, stacked straight up from the shores of the Sil. This is the steep, swirling vista that gave Orly Lumbreras ‘vertixe’ (“vertigo” in Gallego) the first time he visited Vilachá. María’s father used to have a winery in the area and her brother farms the family’s vines. Her razor-sharp palate quickly became the guide for Adega Sernande’s aesthetic. Antonio is a relentless vineyard sleuth, scouring the Ribeira Sacra’s legendary twists and turns for hidden vineyard gems that the Sernande team can adapt, explore, and interpret. The results are sensitive micro-vinifications that reveal layers of this region through an exciting new lens.