Region & History

Long before anyone called Portugal a wine country, London already knew a name from the region around Lisbon: Bucelas. Its white wine had been crossing the Atlantic since the sixteenth century. In England it went by the nickname Lisbon Hock, because it resembled a German Riesling. People drank it in the time of Elizabeth I, then again when Wellington's officers marched through Portugal. A village, famous across half of Europe.

Further west, where the Serra de Sintra almost tumbles into the sea, an entirely different wine grew for an entirely different reason. When phylloxera devoured Europe's vineyards in the 1870s, Colares remained almost untouched: the roots sat in pure dune sand, and the pest cannot survive there. To this day the vines stand ungrafted as a result, pé franco, the same stocks as before the catastrophe. In 1908 a royal decree declared Colares a Região Demarcada, the second-oldest in Portugal after the Douro.

On the banks of the Tejo, closer to Lisbon itself, a politician made Carcavelos famous. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquês de Pombal, owned vast vineyard land there and had his sweet, fortified wine shipped all the way to China. In 1752, King José I gifted it to the imperial court in Peking. Carcavelos too was demarcated in 1908, together with Colares, and shared a similar fate afterward: phylloxera arrived late, and the growing city of Lisbon devoured the rest, street by street.

By the 1980s, almost nothing remained of Carcavelos' once-vast vineyards. In 1983, the municipality of Oeiras therefore founded its own winery, Villa Oeiras, to save the wine. It worked, if on a small scale. Today around twenty-five hectares stand again, tiny compared to before, but enough for the region's oldest designation of origin to be more than just a line in a history book.

Around these three old names lies the larger, less famous part of the region. Here grow Alenquer, Arruda, Torres Vedras, Óbidos, and Lourinhã, where most of Lisbon's wine is still made today. Until 2009 they were collectively known as Estremadura, then the region adopted the more evocative name of the capital.