Winemaker Notes
A beautiful golden color, with a nose full of aroma, with notes of gunpowder and minerality to arise between the fruity and floral. In the mouth, it is very rich, with great texture and very lively acidity. A white with a strong personality to go discovering in the coming years.
This wine pairs perfectly with grilled fish dishes, shellfish, as well as soft and creamy sheep and goat cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
I tasted a handful of vintages of the Vinha Senna Branco, their original vineyard from the 1990s. The youngest of the vintages is the 2024 Vinha Senna Branco, a characterful white produced with around 80% Encruzado and the rest Bical grapes in a reductive way. It fermented in stainless steel and barriques, 30% of them new, and aged in 500-liter French oak barrels for seven months. This is a cool place, where the project originated. The wine is very obviously young and undeveloped, still closed and austere. It has contained ripeness, with 13% alcohol, and very good acidity, with a pH of 3.27 and 7.06 grams of acidity. If this evolves in the way of the 2021, it's going to be a fantastic bottle of white Dão.
With hundreds of white grape varieties to choose from, winemakers have the freedom to create a virtually endless assortment of blended white wines. In many European regions, strict laws are in place determining the set of varieties that may be used in white wine blends, but in the New World, experimentation is permitted and encouraged. Blending can be utilized to enhance balance or create complexity, lending different layers of flavors and aromas. For example, a variety that creates a soft and full-bodied white wine blend, like Chardonnay, would do well combined with one that is more fragrant and naturally high in acidity. Sometimes small amounts of a particular variety are added to boost color or aromatics. Blending can take place before or after fermentation, with the latter, more popular option giving more control to the winemaker over the final qualities of the wine.
Producing some of the country’s most dignified and mineral-driven red wines, Dão is positioned in north central Portugal where granite mountains surround and shelter the region from any Atlantic maritime influence. Summers are long and warm; winters see abundant rainfall.