Quinta do Vallado Douro Superior Tinto 2022
£19.25
The wine
An intriguing wine with vivid colour and intense aromas, combining the characteristic floral aromas of Touriga Nacional with hints of exotic fruits. Intense and silky, with wild red fruit flavours and a fresh finish. From the estate's vineyards in the hotter Douro Superior.
Douro Superior is the hottest and driest sub-region, upriver towards the Spanish border, where summer temperatures regularly exceed forty degrees and rainfall is scarce. Vines there root deep into schist to survive, and the fruit that results is concentrated and firmly structured. Sousao adds acidity and deep colour to the blend.
The producer
Quinta do Vallado
View all Quinta do Vallado winesQuinta do Vallado was established in 1716 and is among the oldest and most famous estates in the Douro, sitting on the banks of the River Corgo near Peso da Régua.
It was once the property of Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira, the most significant figure in the history of Portuguese wine. Widowed young in the nineteenth century, she ran and expanded a vast Douro empire, replanted after phylloxera devastated the valley, and became a national figure; the estate remains in the hands of her descendants five generations on.
The Douro is the world's oldest demarcated wine region, mapped in 1756, and its vineyards are cut into terraces on schist hillsides steep enough to make mechanisation impossible across much of the valley. Vallado make Port and table wine side by side and take both equally seriously, which was not always true here: for centuries the best fruit went to Port and dry table wine was an afterthought. That changed from the 1990s, and estates like this one led it.
