Quinta do Vallado Prima Branco 2025
£12.95
The wine
A dry and delicately scented Moscatel with subtle floral notes of roses and peppermint through to a refreshing finish. Dry Moscatel is a Douro speciality and quite unlike the sweet styles the grape is known for elsewhere.
Dry Moscatel is a Douro speciality and quite unlike the sweet wines the grape is usually associated with. Moscatel Galego is the same variety as Muscat Blanc a Petits Grains, the finest of the Muscat family, and fermented dry it keeps the rose and orange-blossom perfume while finishing clean and crisp.
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.
