Welcome to Episode 6 of Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure and a story woven through so many layers of history it’s hard to know where to start. The boulder fields around the World Heritage city of Évora - in the heart of Alentejo wine country - give the name to one of Alentejo’s most famous and famously expensive wines. Thanks for reading The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure. The podcast’s free: please share it. It’s also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Pêra Manca which means...

Hey there are welcome to Episode 5 of Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure. This episode we take an even deeper dive into Portugal’s Roman history through Torre de Palma - a wine hotel built on the remains of a Roman winemaking villa. Mosaics discovered by archaeologists at Torre de Palma are now being protected at the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon. Portugal loves to celebrate its many layers of history and so we begin this story at a Roman reenactment festival in Beja, the...

I love talking about talha or amphora wine - it’s one of the most exciting and popular winemaking techniques in the Alentejo. It’s natural wine, it’s gastronomic, and it works well with the traditional Alentejo foods like black pork…but it doesn’t taste like regular wine. Talha has an earthiness about it and is often quite heavy - like a lot of wines from Alentejo have traditionally been. But everyone here wants to make some wine in a clay pot - that’s why the ancient vessels are so hard to...

We packed so much into our third episode on the Plansel winery - new wine grapes, why every new grape plant must be grafted on to an American rootstock…and the great story of Jorge Bohm, Dorina Lindemann and three generations of winemakers. But one of the things we wanted to tell you more about was their international wine school, and so that’s the topic for this week’s bonus episode. It’s a basic introduction to wines and wine tasting, so if you’re already an expert please skip straight on...

This episode we discover how a shipwrecked German wine heir accidentally changed Portuguese wines from the roots up, and why his daughter Dorina Lindemann began her winemaking journey with a fizz. Now her daughters are following in the family’s footsteps at Quinta da Plansel winery and plant nursery. We visit their estate in Montemor-o-Novo to learn about vinhos and vinhas – grapes and vines – the varieties, the grafts and the pesky pests that ruined Europe’s vineyards for half a...

Herdade do Esporão has a huge range of wines from the entry level Monte Velho to the once-in-a-blue-moon Torre…with all sorts of wines in between. These are some of the Alentejo wines that you are most likely to find all over the world. There are links to UK and US suppliers below so you can order the wines and drink along with João Ramos’ amazing tasting. João’s moved on - back to Setúbal - and also makes his own amazing wines…but the wines he talked us through were wines made on his...

Now it’s time to head deep into the heart of Alentejo wine country: the hot, dry interior where most of the region’s wines are produced. This episode is centred around the Esporão winery and some of its iconic winemakers, to help tell the story of a wine revolution which has shaped the Alentejo over the past 40 years. Portugal’s wine history goes back even further than the Romans, who brought large scale wine-making to the Iberian Peninsula. The Catholic Church and its sacrament kept the...

You’ve heard the story of Vicentino…now enjoy a tour around the new winery. Every week when we launch a new episode of the podcast we will be putting out a midweek deeper dive into one aspect: the winery, the winemaker or the story. Episode 1 is just down the road from our new home on this wild Alentejo west coast and they’ve just built a huge new winery to produce and showcase their wines. We followed their progress - we captured the moment when their roof went on in May 2023. The building...

Our part of Portugal is known as the last wild coast in Europe and it’s a beautiful place to start a podcast series on Portuguese wine. Long-distance hikers pound the Rota Vicentina Fisherman’s trail which follows more than 200km of clifftops, surfing spots and secret beaches on the country’s Atlantic west coast. And one stretch of this epic two week walk features the first winery on the list for our Big Portuguese Wine Adventure – Vicentino. The wines are fresh and fruity and instilled with...

After months of criss-crossing Alentejo in search of stories, storytellers and the best possible wines, our documentary-style podcast is almost ready to go live. We’ve increased the number of episodes from ten to a dozen to squeeze in some extra elements of a Portuguese wine story. Today we’re launching the latest series trailer - if there’s anyone you think would like to be a part of our journey please ask them to sign up for free, or to subscribe if they want early access to the episodes...