It was a revelatory shock. Ages ago, on my first-ever trip to Porto, I stood in a bottle shop, dumbfounded by the abundance of Portuguese traditional-method sparkling wines on the shelves. Why is Portuguese bubbly not a thing elsewhere? I wondered.
Historically, Portugal is one of the last places you’d expect to find Champagne-style wines. The average drinker is completely oblivious to the country’s high-quality traditional-method bottlings – they are the Mr. Cellophane to Vinho Verde’s Roxie Hart, for the Chicago fans out there. But the Portuguese sparkling landscape has been evolving, with producers slowly making international inroads here and there. And in what can still be a stubbornly patriarchal industry, it’s notably women winemakers who have been bubbling to the top.
From France with love... And a side of sardines
The Portuguese realize the sparkling world still revolves around those chalky hills billowing out from Reims and Épernay. They’re not here to reinvent the wheel or claim the crown. They’re just trying to give Champagne’s venerable heritage an inimitable Lusophone accent.
It all began by the ocean, in the weather-beaten basin of Bairrada. Local lore holds that Napoleon’s troops introduced Champagne-method production to the area during their ill-fated invasion of Portugal in the early 1800s. The Portuguese-British alliance drove the French out in 1811, but it wasn't until the 1890s that Portuguese wineries began producing sparkling wine on a commercial scale. Now, with all things fizz in fashion, and with Portugal’s international profile continuing to surge, the country’s overlooked traditional-method wines may finally have a fighting chance to carve out serious space in markets abroad.
The other, other Vinho Verde
North of Bairrada, in the corner of the country known for “green wine,” a revolution of sorts has been underway.
“Vinho Verde is not the obstacle. The simplification of it abroad is,” lamented Maria João Cerdeira, co-owner at Soalheiro in the far northern reaches of the Minho region. The inexpensive, fizzy style known to supermarket coldboxes worldwide – not that there’s anything wrong with it – has left the region a victim of its own mass-market success. “Vinho Verde is a diverse region, with distinct subregions, noble grape varieties, and the capacity to produce serious wines, including traditional-method sparkling,” she insisted.
Her family’s estate, a household name for still wines since 1974, raised the bar for regional fizz with Iberia’s first traditional-method Alvarinho back in 1995. Originally a veterinarian by trade, Cerdeira returned to work at the family business several years ago, and now oversees the entire operation. In 2024, another woman, the gifted Asun Carballo, ascended to lead the winemaking team, forming a formidable duo that is now pushing the winery toward new heights.
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