The Big Plan for Our Second Life
Why whine when we're fine and there’s wine?
We started the Google search with escarradeira, then moved on to cuspideira and then we started calling people.
A few hours and many phone calls later we realised we just weren’t going to be able to buy any spittoons for our first big wine event at Vale das Estrelas.
And there are some pretty compelling statistics for why that might be.
Who, you might ask, are the biggest wine consumers in the world...France? Italy?
No, and no.
At 61.7 litres per person per year, it’s Portugal by a looooong way, so I guess people here don’t really feel the need to spit it out.
It was explained to us very well by João Barroso of the Alentejo wine commission: “Wine in Portugal is a staple food” he told us. And that’s why the prices are so low, the quality so good, and the consumption rates so high.
People here like to lunch – for at least a couple of hours every day – most shops shut, workers gather around a shared dish in their favourite tasca and it’s all washed down with a jug of table wine and maybe even a shot of the local medronho firewater with a coffee to finish.
As foreigners in Alentejo the options are to: a) get stressed about not being able to go to the shops in the middle of the day...or b) learn to have a long lunches.
You can imagine which option we’ve settled on.
In The Big Plan for Our Second Life, wine has wound itself into the centre of everything we’re doing here.
Wine, of course, is all about the story – a good wine can sell for three or four times the price – if the story is good enough.
And what can be better for a storyteller than to ply one’s audience with booze while the story unfolds? It is only going to improve.
With this in mind we held our first public event in the valley in partnership with Howard’s Folly – a wonderful winery headquartered in the eastern Alentejo town of Estremoz.
Howard Bilton is a Yorkshireman we met through a Hong Kong connection, and he makes wine in collaboration with Alentejo’s favourite Australian winemaker David Baverstock (hear him talking about the iconic Esporão winery he's famous for here).
I’ve written about Howard’s Folly before...back in 2021...have I really been writing this blog for that long? I guess I have.
Detox or Retox?
Inspired by the yoga retreats, detoxifying mindfulness workshops and healthy-living permaculture that are popular in our part of Portugal we’ve decided to start our own wellness movement.
The winery is run by Howard’s son, managing director Tom, who brought their whole range of wines to our stretch of wild coast for our first tasting event.
We decided to make a day of it – invite some friends to stay, hire a chef and put on a proper dinner afterwards...and take the first tentative steps towards running our hospitality business.
Our plan is to hold regular events for locals and visitors alike to bring the history and the stories and the wines of the Alentejo interior to the coast.
We sent out invitations and were overwhelmed by the interest...but then had to deliver!
A stressful couple of weeks preparing everything followed.
It was ambitious to have a wine tasting and a dinner in the same place on the same day...having never done this before.
But it was also a deadline to get the kitchen ready for professional use and the apartments finished and fully furnished – down to the last knives and forks and whisks and colanders.
Thankfully the weather was beautiful and 45 people joined the wine tasting outside with our amazing view as a backdrop to the event. Tom was fantastic – and the wines were great.
We bridged wine and the dinner with more booze: an adventure down the hill for guests to try some medronho made by our friend Jorge, kindly hosted by our neighbour Daniel.
Our vizinho has been working some magic on his property recently – totally transforming his whole hillside with plants and trees: landscaping like a demon before winter takes hold. Daniel was the perfect host.
The three course dinner back up the hill was a huge success – helped along by Howard’s wine – and it was great to meet some new folk and bring people together.
Our winemaker pal Mauro Azóia, his wife Rita and the kids also joined us and brought a special delivery: a car-load of our first Valley of the Stars wine...and the labels we had lovingly created and he had arranged to be printed.
We roped in our friends Danny and Carole and their friends Alfredo and Carol to help us label the first hundred bottles and dip the tops in colourful wax.
It’s a red wine made entirely out of the Castelão grape and we used the beautiful image of a sunset over our valley painted by Ed Sumner, as the artwork for the label.
The first wine to carry the Vale das Estrelas logo is now available for sale! Come and stay with us and buy one while stocks last...we do have a couple of hundred bottles, but Christmas is coming...so you might not want to leave it so long!
We still hope to plant our own vineyard in March if finances allow – we’ve been asking advice from every oenologist and viticulturist who would listen, on the proviso that we will only plant Portuguese grapes.
Close to the ocean and away from the classic Alentejo wine region we will have to battle with the moisture – and the bugs that can bring with it – but it’s likely we will plant Castelão for our red wine.
Unveiling our new wine; with Mauro the winemaker; Danny, Alfredo & Carol with the newly labelled bottles; and the label with art by Ed Sumner
So it is even better to be able have a fantastic Castelão hand-crafted by Mauro as our first ever wine.
We think Arinto and Alvarinho will be the whites we plant, but the study continues – we’d love to get it right first time!
The wonderful Portuguese-adopted Dane Carsten Jensen who’s the bedrock of the nearby Vicentino winery, paid us a visit to advise how to prepare the land for planting, and we’re hoping to secure the plants from Dorina Lindemann and her Plansel nursery.
It’s an amazing process seeing how they prepare the vines by grafting Portuguese varietals on to American rootstock...as they have done since the phylloxera bug first devastated Europe’s vineyards in the late 1800s.
That’s episode three of our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure and we think it’s worth a listen – and it features us learning to spit out wine for the first time.
We may not have had any cuspideiras available for Howard’s Folly, but as sensible grown up wine people, we did buy some vases which could be suitably repurposed.
Suffice to say they weren’t needed.
But we do now have a few spittoons on order for next time, and the time after that…
Wow! Hope we can join you at a wine event some time!
Love reading your updates thank you.
We are looking forward to visiting, the wine and dinner sounds outstanding!
Have fun, stay healthy.