Herdade do Rocim Amphora Red 2024
£20.25
The wine
Aromatic notes of black cherry, raspberry, plum and delicate vegetal notes lead to a textured palate balanced by freshness. It reveals a salty, textural minerality through to a tangy, balsamic finish.
Like its white counterpart, this is talha wine: fermented and aged in buried clay amphorae in the manner the Alentejo used long before the Romans arrived. Moreto leads, with Tinta Grossa, Trincadeira and a little Aragonez, all from the Vidigueira sub-region. Clay gives texture and grip where oak would give sweetness and spice, and the result is a red that behaves more like a savoury white than a conventional Alentejo bottle. Serve it cool.
The producer
Herdade do Rocim
View all Herdade do Rocim winesHerdade do Rocim sits between Vidigueira and Cuba in the Baixo Alentejo, a property of some 120 hectares of which 70 are vineyard and ten are olive groves. The Rocim project began in 2000, and the first years went entirely on restructuring the land: preserving the very old vineyards already there, replanting what had been lost and only later building the winery itself.
What has made the estate's reputation since is talha. The practice of fermenting and ageing wine in large clay amphorae buried to the shoulder is native to the Alentejo and predates the Roman occupation, and by the end of the twentieth century it survived in barely a handful of village cellars. Rocim took it seriously when almost nobody else would, and now runs an annual Amphora Wine Day that has drawn producers from across the Mediterranean. The Amphora range is the result: wines of texture, salinity and grip rather than obvious fruit, made from Alentejo varieties most drinkers will never have heard of.
Alongside that sit the everyday Mariana wines, the varietal Indígena Alicante Bouschet, and an Azores project on volcanic basalt that could hardly be further from the Alentejo plains in character.
