There is no single wine style that typifies Alentejo. Constituting a sizeable part of southern Portugal, Alentejo’s geographical extent, alongside its plethora of grape varieties, ranging from the white Antão Vaz and Arinto to the red Aragonez (better known as Tempranillo) and Alicante Bouschet, as well as the creative freedom enjoyed by its winemakers, means that there is no clear thread that stitches the wines of the region together.
However, Alentejo’s wine industry is increasingly able to be defined by something else – a philosophy or mindset. The Wines of Alentejo Sustainability Programme (WASP) has been a driving force behind this. Under the directorship of João Barroso, this voluntary initiative has been in the works for more than a decade, but it has only just begun.
What follows is far from an exhaustive account of what each of the 27 producers certified with WASP are doing, but rather a glimpse of some of the methods, both obvious and surprising, that Alentejo wine businesses are using to ensure long-term success.
Water scarcity
Despite its stylistic diversity, Alentejo has one key defining characteristic. “The particularity of Alentejo is what’s missing: water,” says António Maçanita, winemaker at Fitapreta. “Man can move mountains, and we can irrigate, but we must learn to work with what we have.”
Some producers have more water than others, of course. As the name suggests, 20% of Herdade dos Lagos’ 1,000-hectare estate is, when water levels are at their maximum, covered by five artificial lakes, the oldest constructed a century ago. “We don’t do dry farming,” explains farm manager Helena Manuel. “In years when it rains 250mm, it’s impossible to do dry farming – we would have to have 350mm of rain and a different type of soil. Ours is a hard mixture of clay, schist and sand, which is like concrete when it compacts, so it needs a lot of organic matter to un-compact it.”
Climate change has made concerns over water management all the more urgent – some data points to Alentejo’s average annual rainfall having declined by 150mm in the last 30 years, while its maximum temperatures have risen by 5°C, although minimum temperatures are slightly lower than they were in the 1990s. As well as the use of sensors to provide live updates on moisture levels in the soil, one method which Herdade dos Lagos, alongside many WASP-certified producers, swears by is cover cropping – that is, the encouragement of plant growth between the vine rows.
“Cover crops are not weeds; they were there before the vines,” argues Herdade dos Grous viticulturist Luis Constantino. “Make them part of the system. Don’t work against them.”
Bat boxes
Like many of the estates certified through WASP, Tapada de Coelheiros, located just north of Alentejo’s regional capital of Évora, resembles a nature reserve more than a conventional vineyard, with bat boxes, wild boar trails and the abundance of deer droppings all offering hints to the range of local residents. However, what Tapada de Coelheiros has fostered beneath the surface of its 53ha of vineyard is even more impressive than the biodiversity above it.
As João Raposeira, agricultural manager, points out, cover cropping is not just good for water retention, but for soil health as a whole. “If you want to boost the diversity of micro-organisms in the soil, you use different plants for cover cropping – legume plants for nitrates and a mix of different flowers to attract different insects,” he explains. “We don’t have a recipe; we adapt to the plot, grape variety and year. We have to create a little bit of chaos to bring balance and resilience.”
In a region which gets very hot during the summer – having experienced two prolonged heatwaves this year – cover cropping also provides a further advantage for protecting the grapes, says Raposeira: “If you came here in August when it was 40°C, it’s possible for the soil to reach 60°C–70°C at the surface when you plough – it’s impossible to have micro-organisms at the surface but, if you have trimmed cover crops, the temperature goes down to 50°C. If you retain the most cover crops, it’s down to 40°C.”
The dryness of the climate is certainly an asset for practitioners of organic viticulture, as the lower humidity means a substantially reduced risk of fungal disease ahead of harvest.
Despite this, none of the above is necessarily easy to manage. But for Raposeira, sustainability is an approach, rather than a checklist of tasks to accomplish. “People think working in regenerative and organic farming is a lot of work, but we have to change the mentality – nature gives you the signs and you respond,” he says.
Producers using soil sensors to enable precision irrigation find it’s also a way to cut waste. As Herdade Paço do Conde export sales manager Jorge Rosado says: “It’s sustainable – if you don’t need, you don’t use.”
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