‘You have to remember that this is a very local winery. The people come with their flagons and fill up straight from the barrels. This is an important part of the life of Mouchão.’ And away the villagers and the estate workers go with the red froth on the new wine still bubbling in the necks of their flagons

It is a dry, red place, burnt bare by the sun. Though it’s the interior neighbour to the Algarve, the Alentejo is another world, another culture, its sky a different blue. It was out of this furnace of a land that the rural workers rose up in 1974 against their absentee landlords, giving muscle to the civilian Revolution. Properties were expropriated. Men who had worked across the generations for land-owning families turned on their employees with guns and cries for liberation from the dictatorial state.

Iain Richardson leans across the table, brown English eyes twinkling from a face polished by the Alentejano sun.

“My grandfather was threatened at gunpoint by his workers”, he says, “but that was more than 20 years ago now.”

Time changes everything and nothing. The same people still work at Mouchão, the estate and vineyards owned by Iain’s family since the mid-nineteenth century, when Englishmen went forth to the Douro to put down the roots of the great port dynasties. Political turmoil swells and subsides but it does not change the lore of the land nor the needs of the vines. Out of this parched, revolutionary land come dark red wines, dense and mouth-filling.

Iain’s mother’s family, the Reynolds, first arrived in Portugal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thomas Reynolds II went to Oporto for business in 1811, on the wave of goodwill towards Britain, after Sir Arthur Wellesley had relieved the city from the Napoleonic French invaders in 1809. By 1825, Reynolds had set up Thomas Reynolds & Sons Ltd, shipping what is assumed to have been port wine. He and his family were forced back to England in 1828 during the constitutional upheaval. The recently abdicated Dom Pedro IV came back from his new kingdom in Brazil to wrest the throne from his autocratic brother, Dom Miguel. The Reynolds family returned to Oporto in 1834 when Dom Pedro had finally managed to exile his brother to Austria.

The business flourished and began to move in other directions, most importantly into cork. Thomas encouraged his two sons to travel in search of cork estates. They went into the Alentejo, the dusty interior region where the world’s most important cork forests grew, and found Mouchão. Increasingly the family turned their attention to cork and to their 900 hectare estate in the Alentejo.

Mouchão, as with many of the Reynolds’ Portuguese properties, has always been run by descendants of the family. In most cases the estates were visited monthly to check on the business or for the enjoyment of the shooting. Although Thomas Reynolds and Sons no longer exists as a company, the Reynolds still run their estates under the family banner Mouchão is one of only two estates in the region to have wine. The other is Quinto do Carmo, now part-owned by the Rothschild family, who realised the potential of the rich, consuming wines of this region.

The main house and outbuildings of Mouchão were built at the end of the 18th century, with whitewashed walls and oblong chimneys wide enough to haul up and smoke a pig. Eucalyptus trees shade the winery from the fiery heat. The great, swollen-bellied barrels sit in the grey cool interior. Mouchão’s Mestre (master cellarman) Joao Alabaça used to get up at three in the morning during the summer months of white heat. He bicycled to the winery and opened up the doors to let in the softer morning air. He slept on a bench until eight when he would shut up again and peddle away for breakfast. He is too old now to perform the ritual. Iain is trying to persuade Alabaça’s son to do the same thing but the younger man sees it as a stagnation from the past.

It is resistance to change that has preserved and refined the intensity of Mouchão’s wines. Mestre Alabaça never learnt to read or write. He did not see the need for either. He makes wine by instinct as his father did before him. He pulls cigarettes out of the mouths of smokers and growls when people slap the barrels in admiration, in that vicarious fashion that makes friends of a winning racehorse owner slap the thoroughbred rump on its way to the winning enclosure. Alabaça will have none of this flashy need to touch greatness. His wines are nurtured and led gently towards maturity.

“Most wineries now use the remontage (pumping over) technique to extract tannin and colour from the skins and homogenise the fermenting must (juice, skin and pips). This is quite a violent way of doing it. The skins and pips are effectively smashed, releasing all sorts of undesirable and often bitter flavours,” Iain’s hand punches aggressively into the air, demonstrating the force of remontage. “At Mouchão we ferment in lagares, the old marble treading troughs. You see by treading the grapes the skins are cleanly split and the juice eased out. It is a much gentler process.”

The hands are softer now, demonstrating the movement of the grapes in the lagares as they roll underfoot.

The estate vineyard produces two wines, Mouchão and Dom Rafael. Mouchão is made predominantly from the Alicante Bouschet grape and then a 20% combination of other grapes, Aragonez, Trincadeira, Periquita and Moreto. The wine is bottled after three to seven years. It is between 13.5 and 14% by volume. At the moment the estate produces about 20,000 bottles a year. This opaque red needs to breathe for 24 hours before drinking. It is a wine with many human traits; complexity, intensity, strength and purity. The red and white Dom Rafael are about a fifth Alicante Bouschet and then an 80% mixture of the same grapes as in the red Mouchão. The production is higher, about 70,000 bottles of the red and 15,000 of the white a year.

Iain goes to great lengths to protect the genetic lineage of his vines. Mouchão Alicante cuttings are sent to France for grafting before being sent back a year later for planting. Iain has his cuttings grafted onto neutral rootstock rather than onto the French developed rootstock that has been purified and inbred for specific French wine requirements. The process is vital, as the rootstock material is resistant to the Phylloxera pest the variety of grape is exclusively dictated by the grafted cutting. Building resilience into the rootstock is a constant battle. The Phylloxera pest first made its ugly presence known in Europe in the 1860s, when it wiped out over two and a half million hectares of French vineyards, putting it on par as an agricultural disaster with the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Even now little can be done once the pest sets out on its subterranean path of root annihilation. The Phylloxera pest came from America, where the growing resilience of the vine roots had created its own immunity, a lesson now being replicated globally with the constant introduction of new rootstock. The Mouchão grafted vines return after a year, strengthened but still true to the estate.

The vineyard’s recent history has been both bright and desperate. Iain came to Mouchão in 1993. His peripatetic wine background had led him from the German agents, Deinhard, in London, to California, Australia and New Zealand, to a post-graduate course at Rioja in Spain and then on to Sogrape, the international wine giant, where he marketed Mateus Rose, the ubiquitous wine of Portugal’s Douro, in the Far East. But during this long pupillage he had perennially returned to his family’s estate to work the vintages, watch and learn. His mother and father had been running the estate until they felt it was time for the next generation to step in.

Iain’s mother grew up in Portugal though she was born in London; a carefully orchestrated birth, as if three successive children were born in Portugal, the third child would by law be a Portuguese national. When Iain returned to the Alentejo in 1993, he continued with the fly-on-the-wall approach so that he could quietly begin to understand the closely guarded methods of Mestre Alabaça without upsetting the passionate old man. Even the subtle introduction of a new water boiler meant that Alabaça did not speak to Iain for a fortnight.

In 1994 and 1995 came low points. There was no production when both vintages were wiped out by frost. Now the estate has the first frost protection irrigation to be introduced in Portugal. It is a sophisticated overhead system that sprays a fine mist over the vines during the night. In this way a duvet effect is achieved, with the mist blanketing the vines and insulating them from severe temperature changes. The Alentejo will probably react by not producing frost for another 50 years.

The estate is remote. The house had not been lived in since the 1950s when Iain moved back five years ago. His parents share the house and come down to stay on a regular basis. His five sisters and their broods descend each summer creating an instant barrage of family noise. Otherwise it is quiet. Long nights to work on the plans for the olive oil, the sheep, the tomatoes, the wines. Electricity is a recent addition. The lack of power had prompted outmigration: 20 years ago 90 people lived on the estate. Now it is only Iain and two other couples of the old guard.

“You have to remember that this is a very local winery. The people come with their flagons and fill up straight from the barrels. This is an important part of the life of Mouchão.”

Iain describes the scene; the bright, hot estate, the straw hats, the flagons filling while Mestre Alabaça watches his art going forth, not the Mouchão or the Dom Rafael but the traditional pressings, vino currente, the current wine. And away the villagers and the estate workers go with the red froth on the new wine still bubbling in the necks of their flagons.

Mouchão’s wines and its hereditary manager are very much of the Alentejo; vivid, intense and isolated from the bastardisation of commercial pressure.

(originally published in Conde Nast Traveller UK edition September 1998)