Valdeorras is "the valley of gold": Rome mined the banks of the Sil here, and the name is what the legions left behind. The valley's modern treasure nearly vanished — by the 1970s Godello had been reduced to a scattering of vines, crowded out by bulk varieties, and its rescue was a deliberate campaign of selection and replanting, vine by vine, on the slate slopes above the river.
The gamble paid handsomely. Godello gives mineral whites of white peach and fennel over wet slate, with enough flesh and structure to take lees ageing and oak — wines that now stand beside white Burgundy in blind tastings. Small cellars, steep schist, a grape back from the brink: the rescue that worked.