Vinha das Penicas Red 2018

Alberto Almeida was born in S. Martinho de Árvore, a small rural village in Coimbra municipality at the southern end of the Bairrada region. From a very young age, he participated in the family's agricultural work, helping his parents to cultivate the land or driving his uncle Chico's oxen on a small family farm dedicated to milk, wine, vegetables and other products for their consumption.

In this context of permanent contact with the land, he establishes a strong relationship with nature, allowing himself to become enchanted by the harvest cycle, the magic of the succession of seasons, the colours of autumn or the smell of freshly tilled soil.

The harshness and charm of ancestral farming practices, especially wine, left an indelible mark on his childhood, imagination and personality.

Later, fascinated by the discovery of the world of wines, especially the classics of the Bairrada baga variety, and in an impetus to return to his childhood imagination, he decided to "return" to the land and make his first wine in the 2006 vintage.

That first winemaking experience led him to the fascinating discovery of "garage wines" and irreversibly marked his destiny. He never stopped!

Restless, daring, an experimentalist and an advocate of sustainable viticulture, which respects the land, the vineyards, the people and the traditions, and above all, passionate about and an advocate of the concept of less interventionist wines, he began work in the Terras de Sicó sub-region to recover old vines and carry out winemaking trials over 14 consecutive harvests, in which he experimented with different winemaking and barrel approaches using the region's indigenous grape varieties.

This experimental work led him to create the Vinha das Penicas - Vinhedos Antigos project to produce wines with little intervention from 2.5 hectares of old vines rescued from abandonment, divided into four plots aged between 70 and 110 years.

The Terras de Sicó Sub-Region
The region has a temperate Mediterranean climate characterised by cold, wet winters and hot, dry summers, with days with a wide temperature range and frequent morning fogs that last until around 11 a.m., allowing for balanced maturation and the production of elegant red wines and whites with great freshness.

The region preserves a unique heritage of old vineyards, planted on soils mostly of clay-limestone origin with different nuances, but where we also find schist outcrops.

The vineyards
The vineyards on which the project are located in the Terras de Sicó sub-region, more specifically in the parish of Lamas, in the municipality of Miranda do Corvo, and in the parishes of Vila Seca and Bendafé, in Condeixa municipality, and are between 70 and 110 years old.

In these vineyards, we can find the dominants Baga and Fernão Pires grape varieties among more than a dozen other indigenous varieties, including Bastardo, Rufete, Trincadeira and Grand Noir, the latter brought to the region by French workers during the construction of the railway line. In the white grape varieties, in addition to the dominant Fernão Pires, we can find Bical, Dona Branca, and Rabo de Ovelha, among other unidentified grape varieties.

To make up for the missing vines in these ancient vineyards, "wild grape vines" have been planted and grafted with "forks" from the plots themselves, thus ensuring the restructuring of the original genetic material.

The concept

This territory of excellence is the starting point for limited-production signature wines using an artisanal and minimalist approach.

Manual labour is favoured in the vineyards, without the use of herbicides, seeking to implement cultural practices that provide the harvest with grapes of impeccable sanitary quality that allow for minimal intervention in the winery.

The wines are made using indigenous yeasts, with moderate doses of sulphur dioxide and finished in top-quality used barrels from St Emilion-Bordeaux for the reds and Burgundy for the whites.

The wines result from a 2.5-hectare field blend of old vines, divided into four plots aged between 60 and 114 years, planted on clay-limestone and schist soils.