Marked by the meeting between past and future, the winery adopts a minimal oenological approach aimed at emphasising the diversity and disparate character of the 36 micro-plots.
As a family, Luisa Amorim and Francisco Rêgo are creating wines that preserve the history of the place. Brought to market two years after the grape harvest, production is small and the aim is to reach around 100,000 bottles. Herdade Aldeia de Cima’s classic and elegant wines preserve the distinctiveness of the estate and are hugely complex, stemming from heterogeneous soils and indigenous and Portuguese grape varieties.
The winery was built in the impressive former cow shed, built in 1953, known as the Armazém das Ramadas. To restore the building, the couple talked with their friends and interior designers, Ana Anahory and Felipa Almeida, owners of the Anahory Almeida studio, whose signature and good taste can easily be identified by the way that they work in connection with the Alentejo’s culture and handicrafts.
The final result - beautiful, minimal and memorable - is perfectly combined with the building’s architecture, formed by thick, whitewashed walls that support an original metallic structure with three wings, built around a spectacular pair of silos in the central courtyard.
Marked by the encounter between the past and future, the winery enables the wines to be made with minimal intervention, where the goal is to highlight the heterogeneity and different character of the micro plots, soils and grape varieties. It was considered to be essential to matured the wines in oak vats and Nico Velo cement tanks, and design a winery with a capacity for 100,000 bottles.
Ancestry and tradition were sought in the ageing room, where wines are aged in small terracotta bowls, each of which is unique, and in amphorae, made using ceramic powder on a natural fibre structure called cocciopesto.
This same respect for the culture of the local village is reflected in the brand image developed by the designer Eduardo Aires. Whatever the path chosen it was essential to transmit the spirit of the Alentejo. During their first meeting, while Luisa was speaking, Eduardo sketched a few lines on a sheet of white paper that corresponded to the façade of a whitewashed house, in the small, dilapidated village, tracing the outline of the door that invites us to experience life in the Aldeia de Cima. Together they started from scratch and focused on the essential - the meaning of the territory that, since 1758, has explored a historical legacy marked by five centuries of Arab culture. In turn, the colours they chose – found throughout the estate and in various details in the interiors – were the green leaf of the cork oak tree and the terracotta red of the clay soil that saw it grow, complemented by the effect of the whitewashed walls on the paper of each wine label.