Long earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon was bottled in Bordeaux or Pinot Noir was the elegant darling of Burgundy, Portuguese vines have been weaving their approach via the fertile plains of the Tagus and Sado valleys in central Portugal, with roots over 4,000 years old.
Ancient winemaking practices have been handed down via generations of fathers and sons, crafting what we now name low-intervention wine—utilizing pure fermentation and minimal components—from indigenous grapes that grew wild on the Iberian peninsula for millennia. During the Middle Ages, as the Catholic Church’s affect grew, Portuguese monasteries grew to become facilities of winemaking, with clergymen, monks, and friars producing sacramental wines for Mass.
Throughout all of it, ladies have been excluded from the cellars—the place the actual magic occurred—and relegated to the vineyards to select grapes throughout harvest time, the product of each patriarchal traditions and a widespread European superstition {that a} menstruating girl might spoil a batch of wine simply by being close to it. But in the present day, as low-intervention wines development in hipster bars from Berlin to Brooklyn—pushed by wine lovers looking for sustainability in an more and more processed world—Portugal’s historical winemaking traditions are having a second, and a wave of girls are at the forefront.
Among these pioneers is Ana Cardoso Pinto of Purista Wines. Pinto is one thing of a renaissance girl—an architect, sommelier, and winemaker who combines her minimalist design sensibilities together with her manufacturing course of. At her household’s property, 50-minutes north of Lisbon, she makes use of her dad and mom’ Nineteenth-century concrete tanks for spontaneous fermentation, which provides texture and minerality, whereas holding sulfites low, the physique mild, and alcohol lowered—creating expressions of grape varieties of their purest kind.
Her Fernão Pires 2024 white exemplifies this philosophy, with its distinctive freshness, and a contact of saltiness on account of the winery’s proximity to the Atlantic coast. “It wasn’t until there were demands for increased production that winemakers started adding chemicals for control,” she says, noting that almost all Portuguese wines have been naturally low-intervention till the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties. “But these days, people are more aware of what they put into their bodies, including wine.”
For Mariana Salvador of Revela wines, up north in the Dão area, the proof is in the style. Salvador fell in love with low-intervention wines after a sequence of blind tastings with one among Portugal’s main wine producers. “It just clicked,” she says. “I understood that this is what I wanted to do. If this is the more natural way, and the wines taste so good—with so much texture and vibrancy—I knew this was the only way I wanted to make wine.” Salvador sources grapes equivalent to Alfrocheiro, a vine primarily grown in the area, completely from small winegrowers, crafting wines with minimal intervention—utilizing little or no sulfites—so that every winery can communicate for itself. “Each vine tells its own story,” she explains. “That’s how the name Revela—which means ‘reveal’ in Portuguese—came about. I wanted to show what each grape has to offer.”