Cintila Red 2024
£7.75
The wine
A juicy, raspberry and violet scented wine made from the Castelão grape. Red berries prevail on the palate while young, with spicy nuances developing with age. Deliciously soft and easy drinking.
Castelão is the traditional red of southern Portugal, called Periquita around Setúbal after the vineyard where it first made its name. It buds early and ripens readily in the heat, giving soft tannins and bright red-berry fruit, and the sandy soils here keep the wines lighter and more perfumed than the same grape grown on clay.
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.
