Quinta da Romaneira Sino 2023
£18.45
The wine
The wine presents a lively red colour. Fresh and elegant, with seductive fruit, balanced and engaging with the soft tannins characteristic of this wine, which express the beauty of Quinta da Romaneira's wild flora.
Sino means bell. This is the estate's everyday Douro red, built from the same traditional field-blend varieties that go into its Port but fermented dry and aged briefly. Douro table wine was barely made before the 1990s, since the best fruit all went to Port, and its rise is one of the great recent shifts in Portuguese wine.
The producer
Quinta da Romaneira
View all Quinta da Romaneira winesEstablished in 1757, Quinta da Romaneira is one of the largest single estates in the Douro: 412 hectares with three kilometres of river frontage, of which 86 are planted to vines.
The Douro was the world's first demarcated wine region, mapped and regulated in 1756, so the estate is almost exactly as old as the appellation itself. Its vineyards are cut into terraces on hillsides steep enough that mechanisation is impossible in much of the property, and the soil is schist, a layered rock that splits vertically and lets roots drive deep in search of water. That is what allows vines to survive summers in which the valley regularly exceeds forty degrees.
The many valleys and promontories of the estate give it a range of exposures and several distinct microclimates, which is why single-parcel wines like Liceiras and Mirante make sense here. Both Port and Douro table wine are made, and both are taken equally seriously, which was not always true of Douro estates. The table wines in particular have become some of the most admired in northern Portugal.
