Arribas Wine Company Saroto Palhete 2024

Arribas Wine Company is a small, boutique winemaking project founded in 2017 by friends Frederico Machado and Ricardo Alves, based in the village of Bemposta in Mogadouro, right in the far northeastern corner of Portugal — Trás-os-Montes, literally "behind the mountains." Their vineyards sit on steep, granite-boulder-strewn hills overlooking the Douro river, just across from Spain's Arribes region — close enough, geographically and spiritually, that they named their project after it.

Both founders cut their teeth elsewhere before coming home: Frederico trained in Enology at UTAD and did harvests with Dirk Niepoort in the Douro, Susana Esteban in Alentejo, and stints in Oregon and Victoria, Australia, before he and Ricardo decided the time was right to build something of their own. Trás-os-Montes is one of Portugal's most overlooked wine regions — cold winters, high altitude, granite and schist soils, and a huge diversity of old, often-forgotten grape varieties (Tinta Gorda, Bastardo, Rufete, Verdelho and more). Arribas farms old, neglected vineyards traditionally and sustainably, with minimal-intervention winemaking, working to show the world what this remote, previously underestimated corner of Portugal can really do.

Hailing from old plots in Travanca, the grapes used to make Saroto Palhete 2024 were hand picked over the last week of September and carried to our cellar in 20kg cases. Whole bunch foot trodden and macerated for 3 days, grapes were pressed the juice racked to used Austrian oak barrels, where fermentation occurred naturally and without temperature control [wild fermentation]. Both alcoholic and malolactic fermentations were completed and after aging for 8 months in barrel, the wine was racked to a stainless steel tank where it decanted naturally before bottling.

This wine is a natural product, unfined and unfiltered, and may present sedimentation over time.