Santo Isidro de Pegões Vinhas de Pegões Arinto 2025
£9.75
The wine
An aromatic blend with delicate floral aromas layered with vibrant citrus and luscious white peach. Crisp and refreshing, with a lovely texture and a touch of spice on the long, balanced finish.
Here Arinto takes the lead rather than playing its usual supporting role. It is one of the few Portuguese whites that can be picked ripe and still deliver sharp acidity, and it ages far better than its price usually suggests. Vinhas de Pegões is the cooperative's single-variety range, made to show what each grape does on these soils.
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.
