Herdade do Rocim Oceânico Azores 2024
£26.95
The wine
Rocim's Azores project, grown on black volcanic basalt within sight of the Atlantic. The island varieties give a white of pronounced salinity and mineral drive, taut and precise rather than fruity, and quite unlike anything from the mainland.
Viticulture in the Azores is a matter of survival as much as ripeness. Vines are grown in currais, small enclosures walled with black basalt that shelter them from the Atlantic wind and hold the day's heat into the night. Arinto dos Açores, Verdelho and Terrantez do Pico are the island grapes, all of them naturally high in acidity and all of them picking up the salt that hangs in the air. Production is very small.
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.
