Santo Isidro de Pegões White
£8.45
The wine
A delicious, mouthwatering blend showing citrus notes and hints of sun-kissed peach, through to a crisp, clean palate enhanced by spicy flavours and a zesty finish.
The house white, blending Fernão Pires with Arinto for acidity and a little Moscatel Graúdo for perfume. Arinto is Portugal's great acid grape, prized precisely because it holds freshness in hot places where most varieties lose it. Fermented cool in stainless steel, unoaked, and made to be drunk within a year or two of the harvest.
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.
