Santo Isidro de Pegões Sobreiro de Pegões Colheita Branco 2022
£8.95
The wine
A fresh, fruity blend with aromatic floral notes together with tropical and citrus flavours and a touch of spice. The creamy texture is harmoniously balanced through to a refreshing and elegant finish.
Sobreiro means cork oak, the tree that covers much of the Alentejo and Setúbal countryside and supplies roughly half the world's cork. Moscatel Graúdo leads the blend here, which is unusual, and gives the wine its floral lift; Setúbal is best known for its fortified Moscatel, so the grape has deep roots in the peninsula.
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.
