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A new surge of writing about Alentejo's wines
Greetings from Vale das Estrelas, the Valley of the Stars!
It’s been a while…but I’m launching a new push to bring you stories from the Alentejo with a piece which has been published on the website of wine legend Jancis Robinson.
The article is my submission for her annual Wine Writing Competition (WWC) and this year’s topic is “your favourite person in wine.”
My choice is the fabulous Teresa Caeiro – a trained diamond miner who came home for her two great loves and now makes amazing talha or amphora wine with her grandfather.
Their Gerações da Talha is already making a big splash with natural wine drinkers.
It’s been so good to read so many fabulously well-written stories about the great characters in wine from all over the world and they’re all free to read!
Here’s a link to mine and the to the many others who are taking part...good luck to them all!
Here’s the link to the piece, and these are some more of the articles.
Meanwhile...
We’ve been busy building our off-grid eco-lodge with a big enough wine cellar to store the wine we will eventually produce...from the vines we will hopefully plant in the Spring of 2025...but more of that to come.
Once the adega is finished we will start of by filling it with the wonderful wines we’ve been discovering across Alentejo, so we can bring them to a new audience outside traditional Alentejo wine country in the interior and closer to the Spanish border.
Our Vicentina Coast – the last wild coast in Europe – is a tourist hotspot which for now is home to just a few wineries.
With temperatures rising and winemakers heading for the hills – or the coast for some fresher climes – we are hoping our region will one day be covered with vines, so we’re getting in early.
Our nearest winery – Vicentino – narrowly avoided being destroyed by a fire which burned thousands of hectares of southwestern Alentejo and into the Algarve.
Their brand new winery opened just a week before the fire when they received their first grapes of this year’s harvest.
But more than 40 members of staff stayed behind with the water tankers and the ploughs to tackle spot fires as they struggled to keep the flames at bay.
The land cleared to build the winery created a fire break, but sparks managed to get inside and if people hadn’t been there it may have been destroyed.
But now the grapes are being picked, the harvest is in full swing, the new winery is up and running and despite the fire, things are going well.
The fire came close to us as well and we were nervous after last year’s blaze which burned our valley and scorched our guesthouse.
Read more about that in my other blog Off-Grid and Ignorant in Portugal which keeps me from my wine...
Podcast production has taken a back seat amid the chaos of building sites, fires and fabulous summer visitors to our valley, but I’m currently working on the story of Pêra Manca, Cartuxa wine and a monastery of Carthusian monks...and a brilliant link to Green Chartreuse.
Podcast Teaser
Listen now (5 mins) | After vineyard visits, interesting interviews, tastings and lunches with the top winemakers in Alentejo (and after hours of editing!) we finally have a series that’s almost ready to launch! We’re now planning events in Portugal, the US and the UK to spread the word and gather listeners from all corners of the globe, while trying to raise the funding we n…
We’ve met some amazing folk on our travels to the US and beyond...and some real Alentejo enthusiasts.
More of that soon, but for now A saúde!
Hey Greg - we’re virtually vizinhos! We’re between São Teotónio and Boa Vista on the inland side of the 120. I tried to message you on WhatsApp but it didn’t recognise you. I’ll try to message directly - it would be great to meet up.
Boa tarde. I was wondering what happened to your blog. We have a small flower farm in João Roupeiro in Odeceixe and got a little spooked by the fire as it got to about 1.5 km from us. We were shocked a couple of days later when we drove by Odeceixe and saw how the fire had come up to the city itself, and even more amazed last week when we drove up to Beja and saw all the burn in and around southern Odemira. Thanks for the update on Vicentino winery, we could see how close the fire came to their fields on the west side of N120. Keep up the good writing, we are thinking about putting in a few vines as we have about 2 ha that we are deciding what to do with.