Amarante & Bairrada · Portugal

Places

Why these places?

Amarante was never actually a choice. It is where my family comes from. There are records of us there going back to 1721. I grew up returning to it long before I ever imagined I would make wine. I didn’t think much about it then. It was simply where we went.

Only later did I understand what that meant. I had not chosen Amarante. It had chosen me.

When I finally made wine there, I expected little. Amarante has a name for wine — but not where we are. We are above it, up in the Serra da Aboboreira: São Simão, a village in the hills, high and cold, the vineyards facing north. Mountain country — the kind of place people keep for cattle and pumpkins, not vines. Everyone had always said so.

What came out was nothing I had imagined. A character I had found nowhere else — undeniable, whether you took to it or not.

Bairrada was different.

It began with the wines. For years I drank them, looked for producers, opened older bottles, went back to the ones that had stayed with me. Some of them were extraordinary — and still the region’s name never caught up to what was in the glass. It was spoken of as less than it was. I wanted to help change that, while it was still early enough that someone arriving now could.

Then I wanted to try for myself.

I bought grapes from a few vineyards and made wine. Some interested me more than others. I went back the following year. Slowly, I began to understand where I wanted to be.

That was how I got to know the people.

Some of those vineyards are small and old, and they are still there because someone keeps going back to prune them, tie the vines, tend them, harvest them. Often, it has been the same people for decades.

And I began to wonder what happens afterwards.

I don’t know if there will be anyone.

It troubles me more than I would like to admit. Because I don’t know what to do about it either.

The only answer I have found so far is to make wine from those vineyards. To try to make them sought after. To make their grapes worth enough to pay the people who still farm them properly. And perhaps, one day, for a son or daughter not to look at their parents’ work and see only something they need to leave behind.

I don’t know if that is enough. Probably not.

But, for now, it is what I know how to do.