I write with happy news of TFWATH collaboration number eight: the invalid vintage, the proxy vintage. Two weeks before harvest was due to start, like a great big dilbert, I fell off my bike and fractured my scaphoid – a little kidney bean-shaped bone on the thumb side of the wrist. Three months and a couple of titanium screws later and I'm pretty much back to normal, but the heavy lifting work of harvest was a non-starter.
Fortunately I'm collaborating with two winemakers who are as magnanimous as they are good at making wine: Fred Machado and Ricardo Alves of Arribas Wine Company.
Together, we are making a field blend – that is, a mix of grape varieties, all planted together in the same vineyard. It's the way vineyards used to be planted in the olden days. This marks a departure from the usual TFWATH MO, which is to make wines that showcase a single indigenous variety.
This wine will in fact be what in Portugal they call a palhete – that is, a co-fermentation of red and white grapes. The ratio is roughly 60/40 red and white. You'll find more on the vinification process below.
A few days ago I was with Fred and Ricardo, in the village of Bemposta where they have their winery, to taste the wine from barrel. What can I say? The boys have played a blinder. Even at this early stage (it has yet to finish malolactic fermentation) the wine is thrilling: pellucid pink and blue fruits (pomegranate, raspberry, blackberry) dried rose petals, soft woody spices and a supple, wet-stone minerality that makes the wines this region particularly special.
With due deference to Fred and Ricardo (left and right, below) for the great work they have done on my behalf, this is going to be a good one.
Behind the mountains
Officially we're in Trás-os-Montes (meaning 'behind the mountains), an isolated arable farming region just above the Port-producing Douro Valley in Portugal's far north-east. But Ricardo and Fred don't tend to concentrate on Trás-os-Montes. Instead they focus on their particular winegrowing area within it: Arribas – a ruggedly beautiful area of steep granite slopes fanning out from the Douro river, straddling the national border between Portugal and Spain.
The land here is formed of ancient Pangean-era rocks (mostly granite, schist and gneiss), variations of sand and clay, and far more than 50 indigenous grape varieties grown in an extreme continental climate, with hot summer days and cold, cold nights.
Arribas does not have any official wine appellation recognition – a Denominação de Origem as they call them in Portugal – but Fred and Ricardo argue that there is a clearly defined terroir here that the official appellations of Trás-os-Montes (Portugal) and Arribes del Duero (Spain) fail to recognise.
'The forgotten corner'
Though it is blessed with areas of rare natural beauty (especially the steep river valleys) and a treasury of old-vine vineyards, Arribas is a more or less forgotten corner of Portugal's wine map. Traditionally, people here cultivated grapes, olives, cereals (wheat, oats, rye), or made hay bales for animal feed, plus, in certain cooler areas, almonds, chestnuts and walnuts. But very little of this agrarian industry remains.
A combination of climate change, declining/ageing population, rising costs of materials and fragmented land ownership has meant that farming here is a shadow of what it once was. On the Spanish side of the border, Arribas is known as ‘España vacío’ – the abandoned, or emptied Spain. In Portugal it's much the same. It feels like a land that time forgot. Short, weather-beaten old men in hats, men who have clearly worked on the land for most of their lives, trudge the empty village streets seemingly in a stupor.
The people here are hard-working, but the work they have done for generations no longer pays. Even the most industrious of them are nowadays forced to take a second job in addition to their grape-growing or wheat-growing simply to survive. Young people move to the city (Vila Real, Porto, Braga) for a better life. In Bemposta, half of the homes are semi-abandoned; some villages are entirely ghost.
Where eagles (and winemakers) dare
Just outside the village, virtually unpeopled and unregarded, is a landscape that takes your breath away, a semi-wild area strewn with massive granite boulders that over millions of years has shaped the meanderings of the Douro river. This is a natural park of the Upper Douro, with ancient rolling hills and moorland studded with oak, olive trees, juniper and scrub, where eagles and vultures glide overhead (a stylised vulture is the logo of Arribas Wine Co) and the Douro twinkles far down at the bottom of the valley. It's an extreme landscape yet one still marshalled into agricultural order – orderly rows of olive trees, or vines studding the precipitous slopes.
It is here that Fred and Ricardo decided to set up their ambitious project, working against the grain of depopulation and vanishing rural industry and attempting to restore something of what has been lost. It almost didn't happen. They would have liked to set up in the Douro (they are both fellow alumni of Niepoort Vinhos, whose main winery, Quinta de Nápoles, is in the Douro, and have worked elsewhere in this celebrated winegrowing region), but it would have been prohibitively expensive. Fred's paternal grandfather was from Bemposta and Fred used to visit the region from time to time as a child. Both he and Ricardo have worked in wineries around the world but neither even considerd starting a project here until Fred's father suggested they take a look. They quickly realised that the terroir and old vines of Arribas were an untapped treasure.
Field blends and old vines
Field blends are the traditional way of planting vineyards and are particularly associated with northern regions of Portugal. In most parts of the world they have been replaced by monovarietal planting, however in regions like Trás-on-Montes, Beira Interior to the south and to a lesser extent the Douro basin, field blend vineyards (vines 60, 70, even 100+ years old) remain – a positive consequence of their being slower to modernise than other regions.
Old vines are an extremely important aspect of wine for a number of reasons: they are generally more self-sufficient and disease-resistant than younger vines; they tend to produce more concentrated, stable wines; and they are a vital part of a region's viticultural heritage and identity. Typically they will be indigenous grape varieties that preceded the myopic move among vineyard owners across Europe to introduce international grape varieties during various decades of the 20th century. These old vineyards tend to be massal-selected rather than clonally-selected too – meaning that they have been propagated by using a mixture of vine material from different vine plants rather than just being replications of the same plant. This means they have genetic diversity, which modern, monovarietal vineyards do not. I wrote an article about why old vines are important a while back. You can read it here.
I've worked with old vines for every wine I have made so far, though TFWATH 2024 will be the first field blend I have made.
The vineyard
Above you see two generations of farmer picking the grapes for TFWATH 2024 wine (NB: it will have a name eventually) in September this year. The vineyard is in Peredo de Bemposta and is a field blend of grapes such as tinta gorda (known as juan garcia on the Spanish side of the border), bastardo (trousseau in France's Jura), alfrocheiro, alvarelhão, rufete, malvasia, verdelho (gouveio) and formosa. The ratio is roughly 60/40 in favour of red varieties, the predominant one being tinta gorda. Ricardo and Fred used this vineyard for their Manicómio 2023 cuvée last year (a palhete with two days of maceration, then aged in 20% new oak barrels for eight months). The owner of the vineyard is the mayor of the village. The vines are small bush vines. The soil is sandy clay with decomposed granite and quartz. The vines are 80-90 years old. The altitude is 660m above sea level. No chemical treatments are used here. Just ploughing to control weeds.
The as-yet-unnamed TFWATH 2024 wine
The winemaking for the TFWATH 2024 wine is very simple, low-intervention: spontaneous fermentation, with two weeks' skin maceration, then pressing using a manual basket press and racking into used Burgundy barrels plus a portion to steel tank. It'll mature for about eight months like this, then it will be blended and probably transferred to one big steel tank for a while, the idea being to let the wine mature for a bit longer but retain some of the lovely tension it has now.
I was in a chilly, windy Bemposta a few days ago to try the wine. I'm excited: it's already so expressive and showing thrilling potential, with ripe pomegranate, raspberry and blackberry fruit, suggestions of dried flowers and spices, a fine, citrusy acidity and a supple, mineral core which you get a lot in wines from the granite soils here.
The alcohol level is about 12.5%. This is pretty typical of Arribas Wine Co style – they like to pick the grapes before they get too ripe and keep sugars at a moderate level. Like me, they also prefer low extraction – you don't need to overwork the grapes here. They give you lots. You just need to keep the freshness in the fruit and you end up with a wine of perfect balance, with complex, medium-bodied flavours and that granitic minerality; supple, mouthwatering, digestible. That's what we want.
To loyal TFWATHers...
We still have a few months to go before this wine will be ready to bottle, but as a loyal TFWATH subscriber you will have first access to it when it is. I'll be publishing a pre-arrival offer later in the year through which you will be able to claim a 25% discount on the standard retail price. You won't find this wine cheaper anywhere else.
I've decided to increase the discount that I offer for pre-arrival orders, partly because I think those who show faith in my wines before they are bottled deserve to a better deal, partly because I want to push pre-arrival sales as a way of selling my wines as much as possible. Ideally I'll get to a point where most if not all of my wines are sold this way. If I can manage that, the sky's the limit (so tell your friends, let everyone know!).
This is it then: TFWATH 2024, the invalid vintage, the proxy vintage. I'm confident that it is going to be one of the best yet.
Cin cin,
Darren
tfwath.com
@tfwath
