Adega do Moucho

Adega do Moucho is a tiny producer utterly dedicated to quality and makes tiny quantities of just one wine. Francisco Perez’s great-great-grandfather, Rafael Santoro, was the first Ribeiro winemaker to bottle his wine and label it. For varying reasons, the family left the village, and the vines were abandoned, but in 1993 Francisco decided to return to the family home and began to replant the land previously used for vineyards. That’s when he met a young local winemaker, José Manuel Martínez Juste, and they embarked on a project that was born in 1995 and in 2000 produced the first vintage of only 300 bottles. Although not organic, no insecticides are used and minimal treatments are carried out and with quality the sole concern, yields are highly variable. Production varies from a high of 450 dozen in 2017 to just 125 cases in 2020. Harvest is carried out over several passages, harvesting just those bunches or parts of bunches that are perfectly ripe. The grapes are hand sorted eliminating any that are not perfect, before a cold maceration followed by pneumatic pressing and fermentation and ageing in new French oak.