Santo Isidro de Pegões Adega de Pegões Selected Harvest White 2025
£10.75
The wine
A full-flavoured wine with fruity aromas of orange blossom and fresh fruits which work in harmony with the oak spice. Rich and opulent on the palate, with a creamy vanilla spice and a persistent, elegant finish. One of the most decorated wines in Portugal at this price.
The Selected Harvest white is the wine that made the cooperative's international name, and it is the only one in the range given serious oak. Five varieties are blended, including Chardonnay and Verdelho alongside the Portuguese natives, and fermentation in French oak barrels supplies the vanilla and the weight. It has won more awards than wines at several times the price.
The producer
Santo Isidro de Pegões
View all Santo Isidro de Pegões winesSanto Isidro de Pegões is a growers' cooperative on the Península de Setúbal, the sandy peninsula south of Lisbon between the Tagus and the Sado. It was founded in 1958 to serve smallholders working land that had been settled only a generation earlier, and it remains owned by the families who farm it.
The soils are the making of it. Deep sand over clay drains freely and, crucially, gave the region natural resistance to phylloxera, which cannot survive in sand; some of the vineyards here are ungrafted as a result. Fernão Pires and Moscatel are the traditional whites, Castelão the traditional red, and the Atlantic sits close enough on both sides to keep nights cool through the summer.
What has made the cooperative's name is the gap between what its wines cost and how they show. The Adega de Pegões Selected Harvest bottlings in particular have collected an improbable number of medals and repeatedly turned up in international lists at a fraction of the price of the wines around them. The range runs from the everyday Cintila and Fontanário labels through the single-variety Vinhas de Pegões wines to those Selected Harvest reds and whites.
