Prunus

Prunus Private Selection is a Dão label rather than an estate name. I have not been able to establish which winery in the Dão makes these wines, so this page is about the region and the bottles rather than about the people behind them, and there is a great deal to say about both. If I can pin down the producer I will put their name on this page.

What I can tell you about the Dão is worth knowing, because it is one of the most underrated wine regions in Europe. It lies in the granite highlands of central Portugal, around Viseu, and it was formally demarcated by a Letter of Law on 18 September 1908 and regulated in May 1910, which made it the first non-fortified wine region in Portugal ever to be demarcated and controlled. Before Port country, before the Douro's table wines, before Alentejo. In the nineteenth century Dão wine was exported to France and Brazil and sold above the Portuguese average, and it won medals in Lisbon, London, Berlin and Paris.

Geography does most of the work. There are around 18,000 hectares of vines scattered through a 388,000-hectare area, so the vineyards are small and hidden in a landscape of rock, pine and scrub. Mountains ring the region on every side: the Caramulo to the west, Buçaco to the south, the Serra da Nave to the north and the Serra da Estrela to the east. They shelter it from Atlantic rain and from the harsh continental winds, which is why Dão is drier in summer and colder in winter than you might expect this far south. Vines grow up to about 800 metres, though the best sites sit between 400 and 500. The soil is granite, ninety-seven per cent of it, poor and acid and free-draining. Granite and altitude together are why Dão reds have always been compared to Burgundy: they are lighter, firmer and more perfumed than most Portuguese reds, and they age.

The region went through a bad patch. Through the 1960s and 1970s the cooperatives chased volume and quality slid, and it took until the mid-1990s and a generation of small quinta producers for the Dão to recover its reputation. It is still recovering commercially, which is the good news for anyone buying: this is a region that has not yet been priced according to what it can do.

The grapes are local and largely unfamiliar. Encruzado is the great white variety, grown almost nowhere outside the Dão, and it is regarded as the most balanced grape in the region, capable of real ageing and developing notes of hazelnut and pine. Jaen, the same grape as Spanish Mencía, has been here since at least the mid-nineteenth century and was probably carried in by pilgrims on the road to Santiago; it gives soft, deeply coloured, delicately raspberry-scented reds. Touriga Nacional, Portugal's noblest red variety, was dominant here before phylloxera and gives Dão much of its reputation.

The two Prunus wines use exactly those grapes. The red is led by Jaen at eighty per cent, filled out with Tinta Roriz, Alfrocheiro and Touriga Nacional. The white is half Encruzado, with Malvasia Fina, Bical and Cerceal Branco. Both are honest, well-made introductions to a region most people have never tried.