Chinado

Let me share with you a little about me and why I began this project. In 2016 I came to know that my grandfathers 1980 vineyard in Alcobaça, my hometown, would be left abandoned and so I jumped in and decided to take over and look after it, even though I had no experience in wine growing, I was just a sound engineer and a wine lover with WSET Level 2 training. From day one I’ve had the help of my friend and winemaker Rodrigo Martins and we’ve done a few harvests together since 2017.

I fell in love with wine growing and wine making so in 2018 I was looking after 2 more plots in the vicinity that have been recently left abandoned. One of these vineyards is dated back in the sixties, which makes it one of the oldest vineyards still alive in the whole region, and it contains more than 30 different grape varieties, both white and red mixed up. Today we have 7 plots in total and we oversee the farming of another 3 where we source some grapes from. We have a planted one new plot in 2024 and we are preparing another 2 to plant in 2026.

Our focus has been on growing grapes in a sustainable way, discarding the use of herbicides, systemic chemicals or poluents and moving towards completely organic farming, which we've been doing since 2020. At the winery we use only grapes fermented spontaneously and small amounts of sulfur, used french oak barrels and stainless steel tanks.

We hand pick all of our grapes, plot by plot, which we also process separately, leading to a quite large number of small vinifications. This in fact demands quite a bit of extra work but at the same time allows us to, year after year, increase our knowledge of every plot and it's unique conditions, as we aim to get the full expression of each one of them.

The majority of our wines are blends of different grapes, respecting the tradition of portuguese winemaking. Some of them we age for longer in barrel, always aiming to get the wines to naturaly stabilise over 2 winters.