One Vision. Three Paths. One PRIME
Paco & Lola opens its laboratory notebook and reveals the secret processbehind PRIME, Spain’s finest white wine
Some wines present themselves to the world with a label and a story. Others dare to reveal their innermost workings as well. Paco & Lola — named World’s Best White Wine Producer by the IWSC in London — has chosen to do precisely that: lay bare what has, until now, remained hidden. The creative and winemaking process behind PRIME, the albariño crowned Spain’s Best White Wine in 2025, steps into the light under the Prime Orixe project. From the Val do Salnés to Tokyo, a story of experimentation, precision and courage.
A cooperative with the ambition of a great estate
Founded in 2005 under the legal name Sociedad Cooperativa Vitivinícola Arousana, Paco & Lola was born of a collective conviction amongst a group of winegrowers from Meaño — in the heart of the Val do Salnés, in Pontevedra — that joining forces was the only path towards producing a wine of exceptional quality, one capable of crossing borders. Two decades on, that conviction has been more than vindicated.
With more than 430 members, Paco & Lola is today the cooperative with the largest membership in the entire Rías Baixas Denominación de Origen. Its own vineyards extend across more than 220 hectares spread over 2,000 individual plots — a faithful expression of the Galician smallholding tradition. Every one of those plots lies within the Val do Salnés, the subzone historically regarded as the spiritual home of albariño, where granite soils, Atlantic influence and the peculiar north-western light define the character of the grape.
Sustainability has always been a non-negotiable part of the winery’s identity. Paco & Lola holds the distinction of being the first winery in Spain to achieve certification of compliance with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and also holds the Bureau Veritas Global Safe Site certification at Excellence grade. This coherence between values and practice has proved, in the long run, to be one of the cornerstones of its credibility in the world’s most discerning markets.
2025: the year Galicia conquered the world
Paco & Lola PRIME is not merely an award-winning wine. It is the result of an entire philosophy: thinking about wine through the lens of experimentation, precision and technical craftsmanship. The world began to grasp this with full clarity in 2025, a year that brought a succession of accolades of very different natures but equally significant weight.
First came the recognition from Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food: the 2021 vintage of PRIME was named Spain’s Best White Wine at the Alimentos de España Awards. The judging panel — comprising representatives of the wine trade and the civil service — evaluated not only the wine’s organoleptic qualities, but also its innovation, its commitment to sustainability, its impact on the rural economy and its international reach.
Then came the Gold Medal at the International Wine & Spirit Competition (IWSC) in London — an honour that would have been cause for celebration on its own, yet which opened an even more imposing door: the naming of Paco & Lola as the World’s Best White Wine Producer. A distinction that places this Galician cooperative firmly on the international map of winemaking excellence, alongside houses with far longer histories and considerably greater resources.
Prime Orixe: when technique becomes narrative
Having cemented its place at the very summit, the Meaño cooperative has taken a step that is virtually unheard of in the wine world: it has opened the doors of its laboratory. Under the concept Paco & Lola Orixe — the umbrella under which the winery conducts its enological experiments — it has presented Prime Orixe: a technical making-of that lays bare the genuine complexity of a wine whose origins were, until now, a closely guarded secret.
At the heart of the project lies a combination that is most unusual in the world of albariño: the blending of three independent microvinifications, all worked on their lees, developed separately and assembled with a single purpose: to achieve the fullest possible expression of the albariño grape through innovation. Three techniques, three timescales, three materials. None seeks individual prominence; all aspire to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Three vinifications, one destination
① Stainless steel: precision, tension and floral purity
The first microvinification is carried out in stainless steel tanks, an environment that preserves the grape’s most genuine expression with surgical exactitude. The result is a wine of exceptional aromatic clarity: white blossom, stone fruit at its freshest, and a tension in the mouth that serves as the skeleton upon which the whole will be built. This is albariño at its most unadulterated — without interference.
② Foudre: structure, depth and silkiness
The second path leads through large wooden vessels — foudres — where contact with the oak is gentle and progressive, without the intensity of a conventional barrique. Here the wine gains body, a texture perceived on the palate as silk, and an aromatic depth that broadens the spectrum without eclipsing the albariño’s Atlantic character. The foudre builds volume without imposing its own voice.
③ Granite egg: minerality and natural integration
The third route employs one of the most singular vessels in contemporary winemaking: the granite egg. Its ovoid shape generates a natural convection current that keeps the lees in constant suspension without the need for mechanical pumping-over. The wine integrates from within. The minerality it imparts is unmistakably granitic — a direct echo of the Val do Salnés soils. This is the element that makes PRIME a terroir wine in the strictest sense of the word.
The final assemblage of these three vinifications does not seek to showcase each technique in isolation. The objective, as the winery explains, is to achieve balance, sophistication and coherence: an ensemble in which the precision of steel, the silkiness of the foudre and the minerality of granite fuse into a single expression capable of holding its own on any table in the world.
More than a wine: an enological manifesto
With Prime Orixe, Paco & Lola does not merely show how PRIME is made: it transforms that process into a brand narrative grounded in innovation and enological research. Each microvinification has been bottled in a highly limited run with its own identity, conceived as a study piece and advanced tasting tool for Masters of Wine, sommeliers and sector influencers.
These pieces are not for sale. They have been conceived exclusively as educational tools and form part of an indivisible narrative: it is the whole that allows one to understand the origin, the method and the vision that explain PRIME. In isolation, each piece would lose its conceptual meaning. Orixe is not, therefore, a collection of wines in the conventional sense: it is a tool for deciphering PRIME from its very source.
This project consolidates PRIME as something far greater than an award-winning wine: a technical reference point where intuition and experimentation go hand in hand. A white wine that asserts, with conviction, that the future of wine lies in daring to challenge convention, to innovate, to reinterpret and to decide. PRIME is no accident. It is instinct. It is vision. It is method.
From the Val do Salnés to Tokyo: a universal language
The world première of Prime Orixe could not have chosen a more symbolic — or more demanding — stage: Tokyo. MW Kenichi Ohashi organised a masterclass entitled ‘Exploring the Diverse Expressions of Terroir and Vinification Styles of Albariño’ that brought together more than one hundred Japanese sommeliers. The task of unpicking the making of PRIME before that audience fell to two figures of international renown: MW Dirceu Vianna Junior and sommelier Okoshi Motohiro.
During the session, attendees were able to taste each of the three Orixe vinifications separately — in an extremely limited edition destined solely for educational purposes and unavailable to the public — before understanding how those three distinct currents converge in the bottle they already knew. A tasting experience unlikely to be repeated, which reinforced, before an audience of the highest calibre, the global standing of PRIME.
The fact that albariños born from the granite vines of Meaño should end up in the glasses of Japan’s most accomplished sommeliers is no mere anecdote. For the winery, it represents confirmation that the silent work — the work that happens in the vineyard and the cellar, far from the spotlight — can resonate far further than anyone might have imagined. From Galicia to Japan, PRIME demonstrates that innovation and respect for origin are capable of speaking a truly universal language.
Paco & Lola PRIME is no accident.
It is instinct. It is vision. It is method.
It is the result of a long period of experimentation that, until now, remained a secret.
Sobrelías Redacción
Sobrelías Redacción