Founded in 1960, the Adega Cooperativa Vidigueira, Cuba and Alvito’s 300 members farm 15,000 hectares and produce nearly five million bottles of wine a year. Few realize that Adega Vidigueira contains the largest vestige of family-based talha winemaking culture. And while the 2000 bottles of Vinho de Talha DOC that Adega Vidigueira makes each year is a minuscule fraction of their conventionally produced wine, it is significant in many other respects.

The Cooperative’s chairman José Miguel Almeida played a central role in the resuscitation of talha culture in the middle 1990s. Joining the seminal Vide Frades Project in 1997, he was president for 10 years during the important period when Vinho de Talha DOC rules were being developed within Alentejo’s governing CVR organization. Following on from that, Adega Vidigueira produced the first certified bottling of Vinho de Talha wine - a point of great pride.

In support of all this, the Cooperative actively celebrates its talha heritage through a purposefully built interpretive center: Casa das Talhas. The center includes a couple of working talhas, a tasting room and a gathering space. The main ‘working’ talha cellar, across a courtyard, is in the process of moving into a beautifully restored, centuries old cellar. During a recent visit, a busload of children from the local school were enthusiastically stomping grapes destined to fill the first talha of the new vintage - the best sort of living history lesson. 

Although the Coop prides itself on preserving and encouraging traditional local talha wine culture, it also, inadvertently, played a major role in its historical decline. During the 20th century, the life of a small vineyard owner and tiny winemaker would have been difficult. Growing and making and selling, let alone marketing and distributing to a wider audience, would have produced a marginal, if not precarious income even at the best of times. 

When the Cooperative was formed in 1960, it offered growers economies of scale, technological security and a steady income, allowing the talha wine sellers to focus on growing grapes, and dispensing with all the more ‘iffy’ parts of the wine equation: making, selling, marketing, and distribution. So it is little wonder that where there were once hundreds of individual local talha winemakers, suddenly they flowed, en-masse, to cooperative production. 

This in turn meant that families had the option to retain a small pot or two for family consumption or to reclaim newly emptied cellar space for living room. Undoubtedly there was a steam roller effect from this, as the remaining talha producers would have been undercut and forced out of business by cheaper, more modern styles of Coop wine. Such is the inevitable flow of ‘progress.’ 

By the 1990s talha winemaking teetered on the edge of extinction, barely kept alive by a handful of people and their living memories of what had been. The recognition of this loss energized some in the community to reclaim their heritage, inspiring the initial activism that eventually established the Vinho de Talha DOC certification and the elevation of these wines to a special status within current production. 

The Coop’s single ‘Centenaria’ Vinho de Talha DOC is unique in being made exclusively from century-old vines. One can’t understate how important it is to commercialize - thus creating an incentive to preserve - these old, field blended, bush-vine vineyards with their seemingly haphazard mixture of many varieties. Several of these are not only unique to the area, but dangerously on the edge of extinction. 

José Miguel Almeida took me to one of these tiny vineyards that was at least 100 years old (perhaps 130 or more). Growing in sandy, highly infertile soil, what was so striking was how the vineyard had survived in such a hostile setting. Whereas other old vineyards I’ve visited around the globe had large, thigh-sized, gnarly trunks, these vines were as gnarly, but considerably finer, more wrist-like, indicating very slow, stifled growth. 

Another indication of their antiquity was evidence of merguila (to put in soil) technique. In the past this was a common way to avoid costly new cuttings of grafted vines. Instead, branches of existing vines were buried, which then re-rooted, establishing new vines.  Snake-like, these new vines plunge in and out of the ground, looking like the Loch Ness Monster. Further evidence of ancient farming practices were olive trees – clearly hundreds (maybe thousands) of years old – inter-planted helter skelter within the vineyard.

The vines included many ancient, local white varieties common within the Coop’s borders: Antão Vaz, Roupeiro, Mantuedo, Diagalves, Larião, Perrum and many others. Almeida mentioned that several are yet to be identified and likely to be distinct new discoveries of ancient unknown vines. And, like the exceedingly rare Larião, tottering on the verge of extinction. Many of the grapes have a wide range of DNA mutations indicating they either originated locally or have been growing there a long, long time. Science reinforces the old local belief that Antão Vaz is the ‘Vidigueira grape variety’.

Within walking distance of Saõ Cucufate, all this begs an intriguing question, going back a few thousand years. What came first, Cucufate and the grapes it left behind or - noting that the name Vidigueira has its origin in the word ‘videira’ (vine) - was it the existing local grapes that attracted Cucufate’s construction? 

This small plot is only one of many the Cooperative preserves within its corporate body of growers. These are some of the oldest vineyards, not just in Alentejo, but in all of Iberia. Many of these vineyards are too tiny to produce even a barrel of wine, but collectively they create a huge and powerful body of old local vines, endangered biodiversity and unlimited potential to make distinctive, highly concentrated wine, and in quantities perfectly suited to talha production. 

My one criticism of Adega Vidigueira’s Vinho de Talha DOC wine is its low price. Between the high labor costs required to preserve quality and the endangered nature of its rare vineyards, financial rewards need to support the obvious value of the time and effort in growing the grapes and making the wine. Given its hand-made nature, use of rare, old, low yielding, highly concentrated grapes and the wine’s notable high quality, this wine should be selling at a premium price.

One the other hand, one also has to respect the Coop’s preference to sell the wine for a price members can readily afford. It’s hard to criticize their choice of ‘love over gold’. 

Perhaps a happy compromise will find its way to a solution. The Coop is blessed not only with a number of century plus vineyards, but many old vines from 40 years up to that magical 100-year mark. It also has plenty of cellar space and many unused talha to raise production well above its current 2000-bottle production. I reckon there is plenty of room for a wide range of tiered branding levels able to satisfy a range of wallet sizes: Centurion, Vinhas Muito Velhas and Vinhas Velhas Vinho de Talha DOC. 

I’d most certainly take a bottle of all three.

Cooperativa Videgueira Talha Wines

Cooperativa Vidigueira Talha Branco 2022 

Cooperativa Vidigueira Talha Branco 2021 

Cooperativa Vidigueira Talha Palhete 2022 

Cooperativa Vidigueira Talha 2020 

Cooperativa Vidigueira Vinho de Talha 2018