If you enjoyed our trip to the iconic Mouchão winery, and the stories Iain Reynolds Richardson told about his family’s 200 year old adventure into the Alentejo, here’s a bonus episode about their wine.
Sometimes there’s just too much to cram into half an hour, so I hope you enjoy our 14 minute whiz through a wine of Mouchão’s range of different wines led by Iain and by winemaker Hamilton Reis who we met way back in Episode 4.
Valley of the Bars
We loved our deep dive into the Alicante Bouschet grape so much that we organised an event around it!
Our new eco-luxe tourism lodge Vale das Estrelas, or Valley of the Stars, on the southwestern edge of Portugal’s Alentejo is finally ready and we’re putting wine at the centre of it all.
In celebration of the French grape which the Portuguese have made their own, we invited Alicante-aficionados, winemakers and interested amateurs like ourselves to taste their way through the reddest grape.
It’s easy to plunge into the weeds of winemaking, but it’s a lot harder to keep everything accessible and demystify wine a bit, and so that’s our mission.
French winemaker Baptiste Carrière Pradal of Domaine de la Massole in the Languedoc – who we heard from in the episode – brought his single varietal Alicante Bouschet from his family vineyard in the same region where Henri Bouschet created the grape.
He explained the generations of his family’s grape-growing history, the wines he now creates and how his plans to pull up the old vine Alicante Bouschet grapes hit a snag when he tried the berries and then made the wine!
Iain Richardson brought his flagship Mouchão wine – the 2017 which was released at the end of 2024.
He also gave us a sneaky peak into the future with a straight from the barrel sample of his top end 2021 Tonel 3/4 which won’t be released until 2035. This is a winery which makes wine worth waiting for.
But as you’ll hear from this bonus episode, there are other Mouchão red and white wines ready to drink including the Dom Rafael and the Ponte.
The Ponte white is 100% Verdelho – another grape Mouchão is famous for – and they even do a line in garrafeiras, or flaggons.
These two litre bottles wrapped in wicker can be topped up at the winery straight from a barrel for a bargain – continuing on a tradition of make fresh, affordable wine available to the locals.
We wrapped up the tasting with some fortified and lusciously sweet Tonel Aged Dessert wine from 2015...again 100% Alicante Bouschet.
We were also delighted to showcase a couple of local Alicante Bouschet growers and winemakers.
Diogo Ribeiro from Adega dos Nascedios brought their Alicante, as did Niels Ulmers from Quinta de Cegonha.
We’ll be doing a lot more to showcase our local suppliers in the future and bring winemakers from across Portugal to our wild coast.
Hopefully this – and our first event with Howard’s Folly – is just the start of a series of wine tastings and events at our lodge Clubhouse.
The best way to try these wines is to visit the wineries, or drop in for a tasting here at Vale das Estrelas, but if you’d like to order some in the interim we’ll post the details on the page soon
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