I love wine and I love stories, and I can’t think of a better place to find both than Mouchão in the Alentejo.
And this episode takes us from Portugal across the globe to the Languedoc region of southern France, and to Sonoma County in California on the trail of “the reddest grape.”
The history of Mouchão winery is intertwined with the 200 year history of the British-Portuguese Reynolds family, and the story of both lie at the heart of our latest podcast episode.
The family arrived in Portugal a little late to join the fast unfolding Port rush, and instead headed south into the Alentejo to become cork producers.
Over generations they lived in palaces, were spies and explorers, smuggled Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe, retained their love of fine wine...and still keep John Wayne’s gun in their chimney.
They survived the vine uprooting policies of the Salazar regime, and had their land and winery expropriated for ten years in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution, but produce wine which can be laid down for decades.
Today Iain Reynolds Richardson is custodian of Mouchão, and still makes wine the traditional way: hand picking, foot treading, manual pressing and then passing time in giant tonel 5,000 litre barrels.
The latest release of their flagship Mouchão brand is from 2017 – their high end “Tonel 3/4" sells for hundreds of euros a bottle.
The reddest grape which Mouchão brought to Portugal is Alicante Bouschet – a French teinturier variety which Portugal has made its own.
Most red wine grapes have clear juice – the colour comes from the skins – but a few run red.
Their history dates back to 1824 Montpellier when Louis Bouschet crossed two grapes to create Petit Bouschet.
His son Henri continued the work cross-fertilising different grape varieties until he combined Petit Bouschet with the Spanish grape Garnacha and called it Alicante Bouschet after the city.
French winemaker Baptiste Carrière Pradal of Domaine de la Massole explains how in the mid-1800s, a lot of French wine was being produced intensively for daily consumption and lacked colour.
Everyone started to grow a little Alicante Bouschet to blend in to made weak coloured wine look stronger and better.
Baptiste approached a gifted parcel of Alicante Bouschet with caution until he tried it, loved it and now produces a single varietal wine from it!
And Morgan Twain Peterson of Bedrock wine company in Sonoma, California tells the backstory to why Napa was 40% Alicante Bouschet in the 1920s and 30s and how prohibition actually increased the area of vineyards.
But the grape’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure began in 1882 when William Reynolds was leading Portugal’s fight against the phylloxera bug which was destroying Europe’s vineyards at the time.
Studies at Montpellier University into Monsieur Bouschet’s red-juiced variety presented some hope the grape could be immune to attack, and so cuttings were brought to Mouchão and experiments began.
Sadly it wasn’t immune to the bug, but the grape thrived in the heat of Alentejo in a way it hadn’t in France.
In the 1990s there were perhaps only 100ha of Alicante Bouschet in Alentejo, but today there are 8,000ha...and as famous international wine critic Jancis Robinson explained...that was mostly down to Mouchão.
It’s now a favourite of Portuguese winemakers.
The reason we visited Mouchão is traced back to one stupid question I asked every Alentejo winemaker we have met so far: “what’s your favourite grape?” and “what’s your favourite winery?”
In a country of 250 indigenous grapes, you’d be amazed just how many came back with the answers “Alicante Bouschet” and “Mouchão.”
We hope you enjoy our latest adventure, and look out for our even deeper dive into Mouchão’s wine which is coming soon.
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