The Alentejo. Mouchão and the art of patience.

A landscape of cork oaks

The Alentejo is the opposite of northern Portugal. Instead of mountains, steep valleys and tiny plots, it is a huge, gently rolling plain with large estates. Cork oaks shade the grazing animals, and the region supplies a large share of the world's cork. In the film, the family explains how cork is harvested by hand only every nine years without damaging the tree, and how the industry tackled cork taint.

Summers are very hot, and that heat shapes everything at Mouchão. Iain Reynolds finds that his best Alicante Bouschet comes not from poor hilltop soils, as textbooks suggest, but from the richer valley floor, because the vines' stress already comes from the climate.

The land also carries a long history of traditional farming. Isolated during the 1950s and 1960s, Portugal largely missed the rush toward international grapes and modern technology, and the film argues that this is partly why native varieties, field blends and foot treading survived here at all.

Alicante Bouschet, the Alentejo's dark grape

The key traditional red varieties of the Alentejo are Trincadeira, Aragonez and Alicante Bouschet. Alicante Bouschet is a teinturier: unlike most black grapes, it has red flesh as well as deeply colored skins, giving very dark wines with plenty of structure. It came from southern France, but it found its true home in the Alentejo.

The film credits the Reynolds family with bringing it to the region in the late 19th century, with cuttings brought by professors from Montpellier University. Today the grape is closely tied to the identity of Alentejo reds.

The Reynolds family and the revolution

The Reynolds family came to Portugal from England in the 1820s, first to Porto and then south in search of cork. Mouchão has been in the family since the 19th century. A neglected cask from 1954, thought to be vinegar, turned into the wine that put the estate on the map.

After the Carnation Revolution of 1974, the estate was occupied and run by a cooperative. By the time the family regained it in 1986, vineyards were neglected and the cellar was empty. Replanting began in 1988. The film shows the bottles the cooperative released under its own label next to the originals, and the family speaks openly about how deeply those years affected them.

Lagares, stems and old casks

Because electricity arrived so late, Mouchão stayed in a kind of time capsule. Grapes still come in through the winery windows into stone lagares, where they are trodden by foot several times a day. Stems are kept, partly because a lagar will not drain without them, and Iain believes ripe stems add freshness, a minty note and finer tannins. Pressing is done in wooden basket presses dating from 1901.

The wine then ages for years in large old casks called tonéis, with slow contact with oxygen, before further aging in bottle. Jamie Goode explains why oxygen helps during red fermentation and why this approach can produce wines that only show their best after 10 to 20 years or more.

Who will carry the torch?

Mouchão is also a working farm, with around a thousand sheep grazing the cork forests and helpful mites released to control spider mites. Iain lives on the estate as its last family member there, and the question of who will follow him hangs over the film. With a large family spread across Europe, watch to see where he hopes the next generation will come from.

Organic certification came only recently, but as Iain points out, an extensive estate where vines, cork oaks, sheep and wild plants live together has always been farmed that way. Jamie Goode explains why this kind of biodiversity, above and below the ground, is now seen as the future of viticulture. There is even a nighttime hunt for scorpions with ultraviolet torches, a favorite sport of Iain's nephews and nieces.

Go furtherWant to taste along? Find Herdade do Mouchão’s wines and where to buy them near you on Wine-Searcher.