Winemaker Notes
This is a beauty! Very complex wine with great balance and style. This rich concentrated wine, is packed with intense aromas of citrus, apple, pear and floral scents with a tropical background. The palate is full-bodied and voluminous, with a fresh and vibrant acidity and great minerality.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Foral de Melgaço Old Vines (40+ years) is an Alvarinho that comes in at 13% alcohol. It's dry (two grams of sugar, 7.4 grams of total acidity) and without fizz. In bottle about 10 weeks when tasted, this is in fine form. It shows depth, surprisingly velvety texture and fine structure supporting the fruit. The acidic core makes the fruit lifted and lingering. This is a beauty, still unevolved, but capable of developing and improving. In time, it may even surpass the wonderful 2018. We'll see, but it's a nice back-to-back performance.
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Wine Enthusiast
Produced from old vines in Portugal's northern Minho Valley, this is a finely textured, ripe and refreshingly tangy wine. Lemon and tight green-apple flavors have a taut mineral texture that will soften over the next few months. Drink from 2021.
Bright and aromatic with distinctive floral and fruity characteristics, Albariño has enjoyed a surge in popularity and an increase in plantings over the last couple of decades. Thick skins allow it to withstand the humid conditions of its homeland, Rías Baixas, Spain, free of malady, and produce a weighty but fresh white. Somm Secret—Albariño claims dual citizenship in Spain and Portugal. Under the name Alvarinho, it thrives in Portugal’s northwestern Vinho Verde region, which predictably, borders part of Spain’s Rías Baixas.
A cheerful, translucid, lemon-yellow and slightly pétillant white wine, Vinho Verde literally means ‘green wine’ and is named after the northwest Portugese region from which it originates. The ‘green’ in the name refers to the youthful state in which the wines are customarily released and consumed, not the color of the wine.
It is typically a blend of various percentages of Alvarinho, Loureiro, Trajadura, and Pedernã (Arinto). Following initial alcoholic fermentation, a natural, secondary malolactic conversion in cask produces carbon dioxide, giving Vinho Verde its charmingly light sparkle.