2012 Herdade do Mouchao Ponte das Canas Alentejo Portugal 750 ml

Wine Advocate: A No-Brainer Bargain 

For a dazzling entrée into Portugal’s Alentejo wines, you can’t do better than the 2012 Ponte das Canas from the historic Herdade do Mouchão winery. “This is a powerful wine, full of dense tannins and impressively ripe, juicy black fruits,” raved Wine Enthusiast awarding 93 points. “ A no-brainer bargain,” concluded Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, a champion of Mouchão’s efforts over the years. For fans of richly textured European reds like Spain’s Rioja reservas, this wine is sheer pleasure.

All that ripe, fruit-laden concentration is the product of Alentejo’s landscape: bare, flat, sparsely populated, the dusty ground blistered by the sun. With vineyards at both higher and lower elevations, Herdade do Mouchão’s specialty is the Alicante Bouschet grape, a high-acid, tannic varietal native to France that thrives in the estate’s clay soil and during the dry, oven-baked summers. This wine’s deep purple hue and earthy boldness are trademarks of the grape.

Herdade do Mouchão is immersed in tradition. Electricity was only installed at the facility in 1991. In the old-fashioned stone lagares, grapes are crushed first by hand, then by foot. The barrel regimen for the “Ponte das Canas” is classical, the cuvée gathering power in French oak barrels for 24 months before continuing to age in bottle. Yet the vineyards employ contemporary techniques, from spray irrigation to a double trellising system.

There’s a joke that people in Alentejo have three speeds: slow, very slow, and seated for lunch. Lavished with care, crafted at an unhurried pace, this wine from the hot southern plains of Portugal ranks among Europe’s most voluptuous and easy-drinking reds.