Atlantic Winery Raises the Fine Wine Flag

Far out within the Atlantic Ocean, between Lisbon and New York, vines develop between the cracks of black basalt lava stone on Pico Island.

The most effective ones develop near the ocean, there the place the crabs sing, because the native saying goes; it is the place there’s larger publicity to the solar, far beneath the wet heights of the clouded Mount Pico volcano, Portugal‘s highest mountain.

Over the previous decade António Maçanita, winemaker on the Azores Wine Firm (AWC), has performed a key function right here, greater than a thousand miles from Portugal’s key wine areas, reworking wine manufacturing within the Azores archipelago.

In a bid to additional elevate the profile of the corporate’s wines, Maçanita has launched Vinhas dos Utras, one in all Portugal’s most extremely priced nonetheless white wines. With a retail worth of €240 ($280) a bottle, it’s also Maçanita and the AWC’s most costly wine.

Maçanita made 1116 bottles of this wine, which the AWC says has manufacturing prices totalling near €20 per kilo of grapes. The white wine is constructed from Arinto de Azores grapes grown on outdated vines on Pico Island.

Maçanita says that Vinha dos Utras 2019 exhibits how the potential of the Azores has now began to come back to the fore. “2019 was the most effective classic – the wine exhibits depth and energy.” The elegant wine, made with low ranges of sulfur, is now being distributed primarily to Michelin-star eating places and impartial wine retailers.

Azores revival

Having been concerned within the restoration of native Azores white grape varieties Arinto de Azores, Terrantez de Pico and Verdelho, in 2014 Maçanita teamed up with viticulturalist Paulo Machado, and finance supervisor Felipe Rocha, to create the Azores Wine Firm.

The corporate now makes a complete of 9 wines (4 of which had been launched this yr) with a manufacturing of about 100,000 bottles of wine per yr – it is no imply feat when contemplating that common yields are about 1200 kg per hectare within the Azores.

Regardless of hostile viticultural and weather conditions, together with humidity, substantial rainfall ranges and low yields, Maçanita was satisfied he might create worth by making singular premium wines with a way of place, made in an uncommon location.

Pico Island is house to the Unesco World Heritage winery website, and to black basalt stone, as soon as eliminated within the late Center Ages to render volcanic soil fertile, after which used to type dry-stone enclosures referred to as currais to guard vines from the battering winter wind and rain. Throughout its pre-phylloxera heyday within the mid-1800s, 10 million liters of wine had been made on the Azores annually. Speedy decline in manufacturing later led to the state-run co-operatives within the Fifties, through the Portuguese dictatorship.

© AWC
| The space-age vineyard on Pico Island is designed to retain as a lot rainwater as potential.

When Maçanita first appeared to make wine on Pico Island in 2010, growers bought grapes at €0.70 per kilo. Since 2014, the common worth of the island’s grapes has elevated greater than five-fold, to €5 a kilo. If, in 2003, there have been about 120 hectares of vines, over the past decade the variety of producers on the archipelago has doubled (from 246 in 2012 to 517 in 2019), with near 1000 hectares of vines now rising on the islands.

The Azores Wine Firm, which now owns 55 hectares of vines on Pico Island and rents an additional 71 ha of plots, has reaped the rewards of its efforts to revive native grape varieties, and proven that it could make a variety of singular, racy nonetheless wines, which converse of a spot.

Rise of Portugal’s nonetheless wines

If Portugal was as soon as greatest identified for its Port and Madeira fortified wines, it is the nation’s sleek, elegant nonetheless wines – together with Maçanita’s wines – which can be seizing the world’s consideration. Nonetheless wines now account for about 65 % of the worth of Portuguese exports, a market share held 20 years in the past by Port exports, in response to the ViniPortugal nationwide wine promotion company.

Portuguese reds from the Douro and Alentejo (Maçanita additionally makes wines in these areas at Fitapreta and Maçanita Vinhos) could also be higher identified, but Maçanita, a key protagonist within the revival of the Azores, has proven how an undervalued smaller wine area will be reworked to generate worth.

Costs within the pandemic stay a problem for Portuguese winemakers, because of the total high quality of wines made in larger volumes by larger firms, bought at engaging costs. Regardless of the super export progress in Portuguese nonetheless wines this yr (up 20.3 % to Could 2021 as compared with 2020) and progress in 2020, when wine exports from EU rivals decreased, Portugal faces the problem of accelerating low export costs.

In 2020, the common worth of Portuguese wines fell by 1.6 % to €2.71 per liter, in contrast with 2019, in response to IVV, Portugal’s wine and vine institute. That stated, there’s an growing variety of high-end white wines, made in smaller volumes with retail costs above €40, in revived areas like Bucelas, Colares, Portoalegre in Alentejo, and areas of Vinho Verde.

New vineyard

Maçanita, aged 41, is one in all many younger Portuguese winemakers who’re making sleek, elegant, less-oaky wines, with low-intervention practices. Having named Maçanita Winemaker of the 12 months in 2018, in 2020 the Portuguese wine journal, Revista de Vinhos, named Maçanita’s Fitapreta property in Alentejo Producer of the 12 months.  In Could this yr, the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Negocios even described Maçanita as “the astronaut of wine”: daring and adventurous, going past Portugal’s key and esteemed wine areas of Douro, Alentejo and Vino Verde.

It might have been a reference to the Azores Wine Firm’s new €3 million space-age vineyard, which is etched out of the lava stone on Pico Island. Opened in June this yr, the fashionable, modern, and tilted construction, designed to retain rainfall, consists of lodging for vacationers.

In his quest to create worth from lesser identified or undervalued areas, Maçanita has now began to make wine from grapes grown on the Portuguese island of Porto Santo, positioned subsequent to its larger sister island, Madeira. 

In September this yr, Maçanita plans to launch Profetas, (Prophets), a brand new nonetheless white wine constructed from Listrao Branco (Palomino Fino) grapes, grown on Porto Santo’s limestone soils, the place decrease acidity ranges are a larger problem than the rainfall of the Azores. Having first made wine within the Alentejo within the mid-2000s, the island is unlikely to be Maçanita’s final cease on his winemaking journey.

Within the spirit of his Azores enterprise, which helped put the Azores on the trendy wine map, it might not be stunning if he had been to make wines elsewhere on Europe’s Atlantic edge.  

In 2019, when Brazilian on-line wine publication VivaOVinho requested which area he would select if he needed to produce wine outdoors of Portugal, Maçanita replied: “I very very like the air of coastal websites: Muscadet, for instance, is a really attention-grabbing and far undervalued wine, made in a area with a fantastic maritime affect – for that reason I might additionally select Cape Verde or the Canary Islands; let it’s islands or locations near the ocean.”