Cintila Extra Dry
£8.95
The wine
A buttery, cereal-like nose leads to a rich and creamy fore-palate. Then the wonderful acidity kicks in and leaves the mouth gasping for more. Remarkable sparkling wine for the money.
Traditional-method sparkling is rare in this part of Portugal, and rarer still from Fernão Pires, a grape usually made into aromatic still whites. Picking early keeps the acidity high enough to carry a second fermentation, and time on the lees supplies the buttery, cereal character. Remarkable value for a sparkling wine of this style.
The producer
Santo Isidro de Pegões
View all Santo Isidro de Pegões winesSanto Isidro de Pegões is a growers' cooperative on the Península de Setúbal, the sandy peninsula south of Lisbon between the Tagus and the Sado. It was founded in 1958 to serve smallholders working land that had been settled only a generation earlier, and it remains owned by the families who farm it.
The soils are the making of it. Deep sand over clay drains freely and, crucially, gave the region natural resistance to phylloxera, which cannot survive in sand; some of the vineyards here are ungrafted as a result. Fernão Pires and Moscatel are the traditional whites, Castelão the traditional red, and the Atlantic sits close enough on both sides to keep nights cool through the summer.
What has made the cooperative's name is the gap between what its wines cost and how they show. The Adega de Pegões Selected Harvest bottlings in particular have collected an improbable number of medals and repeatedly turned up in international lists at a fraction of the price of the wines around them. The range runs from the everyday Cintila and Fontanário labels through the single-variety Vinhas de Pegões wines to those Selected Harvest reds and whites.
