Quinta do Vallado Tinto 2024
£12.75
The wine
A concentrated and beautifully structured Portuguese red blend with intense notes of mature red fruit, hints of violet and herbaceous nuances carrying through to a lingering finish. Remarkable value from a historic Douro estate.
The Douro's reds are traditionally field blends, several varieties planted together in the same vineyard and picked as one, and Vallado's entry wine follows that thinking. Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca lead, with Tinta Roriz, which is Tempranillo, and Tinta Barroca. Remarkable value from an estate of this history.
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.
