Our work
Vineyards
Manual labour : precision and attention
Every task carried out by hand in our vineyards has a specific purpose and unrivalled efficiency. Several fundamental stages punctuate our wine-growing year:
Pruning (December to March): this crucial operation regulates the vigour of the vines, promoting quality over quantity in the harvest. Each vine is pruned individually, according to its specific characteristics. Pruning has always been a fascination of mine, and I have been driven to study more and more for finer pruning practices.
This has led me to follow pretty closely the practices and teachings of the “Architecte du Vivant” group, led by Marceau Bourdarias.
These teachings brought me to a better understanding of a vine’s physiology, needs, and intimate balance.
Productivity is strictly adjusted one vine at a time by careful analysis of it’s abilities, this is a crutial element when renovating very old co-planted vineyards, as each plant needs to be nurtured back to full health before being asked to produce more.
Winemaking : Dão tradition and french luggage.
To explain our practices in the winery let us first introduce our building :
At the highest point in the building, a 300 years old granit lagar, or what I like to describe as a horizontal tank, as opposed to a vertical one, meaning that we have a lot of surface area, with very little depth in the tank.
Another one, younger at it’s side. Both are equipped with wonderful hydraulic presses cemented at their center.
These lagars have been the preferred maceration vessels in the region for at least 2000 years, as we still have vestiges of them all over the region. They are shallow for easy foot treading, great extraction during a short maceration.
This is where the claretes are made. staying here for up to 72h
Foot trodden as is the traditional way, for perfect extraction.
The level below in the winery is full of tanks, cement and a few stainless steel, not all in use, but being renovated one by one. Here most wines only pass through between pressing and racking, and then back up from the barrels before bottling. Red wines stay for longer in tanks, fermenting here in open top tanks.
Dão, our adoptive region
We came here for the first time in 2016, visiting a wine region, as we regularly did.
Right away, we knew we had found a place for ourselves.
We felt right here. the balance of southern climate, but still pretty cold and fresh, with good rainfall. All this mixed in with rich winemaking and farming history, not a lot of producers compared with the general viticultural area made this feel like a perfect mix between old world traditions and new world blank slate wine region. Solid foundations but much building to do.
One of such foundations is the wide genetic diversity we are lucky enough to work with here. Still barely known, the grape varieties of the region offer great complexity, and most people argue only the blends show greatness in Dão apart from a few grapes like Touriga Nacional.
This also brings a probable great evolution in the coming climatic alterations, as many wine regions start looking for their lost genetic diversity as a way to endure, we still have it planted and producing.
Granitic soils, a lot of humidity but not too much for easy fungus control, huge diurnal shifts… A whole new climate for us to discover, leading us to experiment every year. Each harvest is different of course, but the constants we have been able to recognize are a great freshness, even in the hottest vintages.