“Alicante Bouschet in it’s prime”
Steven Spurrier, Decanter
Vineyard
It is in hot and dry climates that Alicante Bouschet best expresses itself. This noble variety thrives in the deep, alluvial, well-drained soils of the valley floors of Mouchão. These conditions are unique and irreplicable throughout the Alentejo.
Approximately half the grapes produced on the property are Alicante Bouschet. Other varieties such as Trincadeira, Aragonez, Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca and Syrah are also grown on the estate, largely on shallower, more skeletal, gravelly soils.
The white varieties Antão Vaz, Arinto and Verdelho are mainly located on the slopes of the Mouchão dam and adjacent to the Almadafe and Jordana streams.
Of the estate’s 900 hectares only 45 of the most fertile, have been dedicated to viticulture, best expressing the exceptional terroir.
Alicante Bouschet
As well as building their business around cork for half a century, the Reynolds family created strong ties with Portuguese viticulture, with Williams Reynolds taking on the role as President of the National Committee against Phylloxera in the 1880’s.
In the late 1800’s, John Reynolds, having got wind of the radical viticultural developments taking place in southern France, contacted viticulturists and grapevine breeders at Domaine La Calmette, near Montpelier. “The Midi, not Bordeaux or Burgundy …(was) where the greatest technical progress in wine making took place in the nineteenth century” (Rosemary George, MW).
Around this time, two professors from Montpellier visited Mouchão, bringing with them cuttings of a new teinturier grape, Alicante Bouschet, created by Henri Bouschet in 1855.
An 1894 map of the estate shows Alicante Bouschet was already established in the Dourada vineyard.