Just outside the village of Bemposta in Trás-os-Montes, northern Portugal, virtually unpeopled and unregarded, is a landscape that takes your breath away; a semi-wild area strewn with massive granite boulders that over millions of years has shaped the meanderings of the Douro river.
This is a natural park of the Upper Douro, with ancient rolling hills and moorland studded with oak, olive trees, juniper and scrub, where eagles and vultures glide overhead, and the Douro twinkles far down at the bottom of the valley. It's an extreme landscape yet one still marshalled into agricultural order – orderly rows of olive trees, or vines studding the precipitous slopes.
It is here that former Niepoort alumni Fred Machado and Ricardo Alves decided to set up their ambitious winemaking project, Arribas Wine Company – working against the grain of depopulation and vanishing rural industry and attempting to restore something of what has been lost.
Officially we're in Trás-os-Montes (meaning 'behind the mountains'), but Ricardo and Fred don't tend to refer to Trás-os-Montes. Instead they focus on their particular winegrowing area within it: Arribas – the ruggedly beautiful area of steep granite slopes fanning out from the Douro river towards the altiplano, and the national border between Portugal and Spain.
The land here is formed of ancient Pangaean-era rocks (mostly granite, schist and gneiss), variations of sand and clay, and far more than 50 indigenous grape varieties grown in an extreme continental climate, with hot summer days and cold, cold nights.
Arribas does not have any official wine appellation recognition – a Denominação de Origem as they call them in Portugal – but Fred and Ricardo argue that there is a clearly defined terroir here that the official appellations of Trás-os-Montes (Portugal) and Arribes del Duero (Spain) fail to recognise.
Field blends are the traditional way of planting vineyards and are particularly associated with northern regions of Portugal. In most parts of the world they have been replaced by monovarietal planting, however in regions like Trás-on-Montes, Beira Interior to the south and to a lesser extent the Douro basin, field blend vineyards (vines 60, 70, even 100+ years old) remain – a positive consequence of their being slower to modernise than other regions.
Grape varieties that Fred and Ricardo use include tinta gorda (known as juan garcia on the Spanish side of the border), bastardo (trousseau in France's Jura), alfrocheiro, alvarelhão, rufete, malvasia, verdelho (gouveio) and formosa. They are all old-vine field blends; some clinging to the sleep gorges of the Douro river; others laying further inland on the plateau, or altiplano of the interior. Soils range from granitic sand to schist, with some areas very rocky and quartz-strewn; others more composed of clay.
The wines that Fred and Ricardo make have steadily improved since they started their project in 2017. At this point, having marshalled all of their experience and shared expertise, they are outstanding examples of what this unsung region can offer. From the entry-level Saroto range up to the showpiece single-site bottlings, they display a striking fruit freshness, complex, medium-bodied flavours and a fine (typically granitic) minerality.