In 2019 one of the neighbours of the Herdade Aldeia de Cima asked the estate’s owners whether they could harvest the grapes from two small vineyard plots - Cevadeira and Zorreira - located in Cevadeira, on the foothills of the Serra do Mendro, encompassing a total of 1.5 hectares
The old vines, grown using rainfed viticulture, consisted solely of traditional red grape varieties – Alfrocheiro, Tinta Grossa and Trincadeira –, and were treated with little productive intervention, producing a very small production level, of only 0.75 Kg per vine.
The granitoid soil of the eruptive complex in Vidigueira, which consists of evolved quartz-diorites, from medium to fine grain, with characteristics that are very close to the transition of the higher schists, gives rise to a wine that has a very specific identity.
We are in a transition zone, with non-clay soils, primarily consisting of diorites, derived from the diversity and geological fault of the Serra do Mendro. in this windy area at the foot of the mountain, on poor, shallow and well-drained soils that a complementary activity to the forest has been developed since very ancient times - the cereal crop. The name Cevadeira appears as a reference to the cultivation of barley, a centuries-old practice that has been maintained over the years, occupying a central place in the agriculture of the Alentejo and Portugal until the 1970s, when the free forms of training the vines planted in different rows teach us how to get the best from the earth using organic techniques: three-dimensional canopies, cheerful, brimming with life, as if they were always looking for the best way to hide the bunches of grapes from the powerful sunlight in July. Here, in this unspoilt site, the vine-time binomial is a testament to the ancestry of the vine.