Producer Dão, Portugal
Prunus
Prunus Private Selection is a Dão label rather than an estate name, and the story worth telling here is the region's, because the Dão is one of the most underrated wine regions in Europe.
It lies in the granite highlands of central Portugal, around Viseu. It was formally demarcated by a Letter of Law on 18 September 1908 and regulated in May 1910, which makes it one of the oldest demarcated table-wine regions in Portugal. 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 almost all granite, poor, 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 Prunus wines are built from exactly those grapes: reds led by Jaen and filled out with Tinta Roriz, Alfrocheiro and Touriga Nacional, and whites centred on Encruzado with Malvasia Fina, Bical and Cerceal Branco. They are honest, well-made introductions to a region most people have never tried.
£14.99 a bottle
