Charlie (‘Carlota’) Allen pays us a visit from over the border in Spain. She farms 15 hectares of old vines around Fermoselle above the Douro / Duero (see my entry for 20^th January 2010 for more information). We have a feast of a dinner at Tomba Lobos in her honour with some fellow Alentejo wine producers and oenophiles: lingua de vitela (veal tongue), frogs legs, toucinho (deliciously fatty bacon), escabeche de perdiz (partridge escabeche), molejas de borego, local truffles (so called ‘spring mushrooms’), venison, cabeça de vaca (‘cow’s head). Everyone brought a couple of bottles of wine. The surprises of the evening were a Cartuxa Branco 1991, still fresh and recognisably Roupeiro after 19 years, a bottle of Platano Velho 1999, from the co-op at Alijó which had held up well. However the stars of the evening were perhaps to be expected: a bottle of Charles Heidseick n/v brought with me from the UK,  a powerful Quinta do Mauro (gold label) 2002 and Charlie Allen’s dense,  fine-grained  yet voluptuous Pirita 2007. I must reserve myself a case of this to cellar in the UK.

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It feels more like March than May. A cold north wind is blowing over the Serra.    Heavy, thundery showers alternate with bright sunshine and the temperature was just 6oC at the end of the afternoon. After a spell of warm weather at the end of April, the vines are busting forth but so are the weeds! We are now mowing in between the rows of vines and the vineyard looks so much better. Long term this will be good for the soil and reduce the amount of erosion on some of the steeper slopes. We have spent the week together the final lote for the 2008 Pedra Basta this week and it looks pretty good. The wine is similar in style to the 2007 with fresh berry fruit with firm, well defined tannins. It has the finesse that we are looking for (lacking from so many wines from the Alentejo) and I think it will develop well in bottle. We plan to the bottle wine next month and release it at the end of the summer.

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