Vale da Capucha Branco 2017 Organic

€ 23.50

The wine has flavours and aromas of exotic tropical and stone fruit, mixed with spice tones, anise, paperwhites and dusty mineral. Unmistakeable sea spray aromas. On the palate, fleshy stone fruit gives way to an intensely mineral backbone with chalk and sea salt providing balance and length.

Pedro Marques is the fifth-generation in a winemaking family, based in Torres Vedras, just north of Lisbon. He has always been captivated by the subtlety and restrained minerality of the wines of central France, and the idea of ensuring the personality of a vineyard is expressed in the glass. His 13 hectares of vineyards, situated 9 km from the coast, have soils of Kimmeridgian clay with high proportion of ocean fossils, similar to those found in Chablis. The vineyards are bathed by fresh Atlantic breezes, further enhancing the saline element in the wines and tempering the warmth of the region. He has been certified organic since 2015, no easy task in this humid climate. His main plantings are white grapes – predominantly Portuguese locals Arinto and Fernão Pires plus a little Alvarinho, Gouveio, Viosinho and Antão Vaz. He also has a co-planting of Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz; a site with 80+ year old Castelão; and a small parcel of Syrah. In his own word he follows a “lazy” approach to winemaking, his only addition being a touch of SO2. His wines show great character, if you like textural, terroir-driven wines, this young winemaker is one to watch.

Food pairing

It's perfectly with the fish-based seconds, grilled sardines, to be tried with fillet bushes with cherry tomatoes and olives.

Grapes: 100% Gouveio

Alcohol content

13 %vol

Storing & Saving

Store in a cool place (around 12ºC). We recommend tasting it at a temperature of 10/12 °C in tulip chalice

Critics & Awards

The Marques family and their estate, Vale da Capucha, represent the viticultural renaissance that the Lisboa DO has experienced over the last decade. Having grown fruit for bulk wine production for a few generations, they realised that their heritage and terroir was something worth expressing. While their adjacent neighbors routinely turn out yields in excess of 25 tons per hectare, Vale do Capucha has trimmed theirs to under 6.

Only 10 km from the Atlantic Ocean just outside of Lisbon, Vale do Capucha is a property whose wines speak to the presence and proximity of the ocean. Winemaker Pedro Marques has taken the reins of the estate from his family, replanted it entirely with indigenous varieties, and has set about expressing a singular message of terroir. Pedro follows the ethos that 'great wine is made in the vineyard'. The precept is simple: maximum human work in the vineyard and minimum intervention in the winery. The resulting terroir-driven wines come from a medley of Portuguese varieties.

Capucha refers to the ancient Roman military road that led from Lisbon to Santarai, and both fossilized seashells and ancient Roman artifacts are consistently unearthed on the property, situated on a 400 million year-old thread of Kimmeridgian limestone. With minimal interventionist winemaking, Marques manages to clearly express the minerality and salinity of these ocean-inflected vineyards.

Tags: Lisboa, Torres Vedras