Herdade do Rocim Mariana White 2024
£10.95
The wine
A richly flavoured and aromatic wine with exuberant tropical and herbal notes. Fresh, mineral and textured, with vibrant balancing acidity through to a lively, zesty finish.
Antão Vaz does the work here. It is the Alentejo's most dependable white grape, thick-skinned enough to cope with the heat of the Baixo Alentejo without losing shape, and it gives the wine its weight and its stone-fruit character. Arinto sharpens the acidity and a little Alvarinho lifts the aromatics. Mariana is the entry point to the Rocim range and the wine the estate makes most of, which is precisely why it is a fair measure of how well they farm.
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.
