Santo Isidro de Pegões Fontanário de Pegões White 2025
£8.95
The wine
A refreshing wine showing the typical herbal and peachy aromatics and flavours of Fernão Pires. Balanced, with a touch of spice on the finish. From the Palmela appellation, where the sandy soils suit the variety well.
Fontanário means drinking fountain. This one carries the Palmela appellation rather than the broader Península de Setúbal, a smaller zone on the same sandy soils with stricter rules on varieties and yields. Fernão Pires dominates, with Arinto for cut, and the wine is unoaked and made for early drinking.
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.
