Fitapreta’s agro-engineer winemaker Antonio Mançanita is a free thinker who is willing to consider new solutions to old problems and just as happy challenging conventional thinking, sometimes from outside the box, sometimes from within. Initially educated and trained in Portugal, he broadened his perspective working in California, Bordeaux and Australia. Along the way he developed a close friendship with a like-minded English viticulturist named David Booth, and the two founded the Fitapreta project in 2004, making their first wine in Alentejo that year.

Fitapreta’s formative period paralleled the Californian garagistas movement, buying in grapes from interesting vineyards and then making wine in borrowed facilities. The project grew by leaps and bounds during the 2000s, creating a number of novel and innovative wines from rare, unusual or endangered local varieties from old vineyards. These were bottled under innovative names and marketing, and eventually grew into four wine brands produced in the Azores, Douro and Alentejo.

Then in 2008, while working with biodynamic-inspired concrete eggs in California, Mançanita had a light bulb moment. He’d seen something like this before back in Portugal, although in a considerably more ancient, upside-down form, and made from clay. 

Returning to Alentejo in 2010, he took a pioneering stab at working with talha. Significantly, Fitapreta’s first Branco de Talha was produced before Vinho de Talha DOC regulations were formally established. 

Following David Booth’s tragic premature death in 2012, Fitapreta eventually found a permanent home at Paço do Morgado de Oliveira in 2016. This magnificent 14th century palace just north of Evora is surrounded by extensive vineyards on gentle slopes. Counterpointing the palace, across its courtyard they’ve built a tastefully designed ‘minimalist’ cork and reconstituted-wood-clad, gravity-fed winery with a glass-walled tasting room that offers amazing views of nearby ruins. The project remains a work in progress, with the addition of another 20 hectare property with 50-year-old vines and the palace’s disused original cellars in the process of being converted back over to talha wine production. Talha restored, once again, to their rightful place.

Fitapreta make a wide range of wine styles using a variety of methods and technologies, both modern and old, ranging between stainless steel tanks, oak barrels, extended skin contact, talha and, even, Jerez’s flor yeast fermentation method used for making fino sherry. Mançanita would be the first to admit he does not follow a pure, traditionalist approach to talha production. Some whites are crushed and pressed and separated from skins before going into talha for fermentation, others are fermented with a month or two of skin contact, then moved to stainless steel for a year of ageing, and still others might maintain skin contact until April. Everything depends on the fruit and the season and what technique Mançanita thinks will serve the wine best. This approach treats talha more as a technology harnessed to produce desired results in an end wine, rather than a wine style dependent on strict adherence to a cultural tradition the DOC formula is designed to preserve.

The irony here is that because their first Branco de Talha wine predates the establishment of formal regulations for Vinhos de Talha DOC, Fitapreta’s non-certified talha-made wines are legally allowed to use the term ‘talha’ freely on their label.  This allows Fitapreta a unique degree of creative freedom no other Alentejo winery is afforded, whereas all other non-certified, talha-made wines must be designated as ‘amphora’ made.   

Most of Fitapreta’s talha wine is white, except for a single red, with all of the grapes grown organically. Natural ferments are the norm, employing yeast that is started in each vineyard 4 or 5 days before harvest, a liter of which is placed in each talha to help supercharge the fermentation’s start. Pés is not used because Mançanita wants pure terracotta contact, gaining the polished texture from oxygen transfer, while avoiding the pés flavoring. 

Other, more unconventional approaches employ stainless steel cooling tubes lowered into talha to reduce fermentation temperatures to preserve fruit freshness and aromatics. Talha are not drained from the bottom; instead a hose is lowered in from the top and wine pumped out into stainless steel tanks. 

Mançanita sees the point of skin contact as countering the potentially harmful effect of too much oxygen ingress while in talha. Too little skin contact and the wine oxidizes quickly, too much and it becomes too tannic. Managing this delicate balance requires a careful watch over the wine after fermentation to determine precisely when to remove the wine from talha and grape skins. Here is where Mançanita disagrees with Vinho de Talha DOC’s requirement to keep wine on skins in talha for 2-3 months until St. Martin’s Day. Rather than a rigid period applied to all wine, regardless of how individual grapes grew within a season, his approach requires more flexible timing to obtain the optimal results from the interaction between grape, their skins and the talha.  

For example, Mançanita followed very different practical approaches in 2019, a very hot vintage, compared to 2018’s cool, late harvest or the earlier picked harvest of 2017. Obviously, the acidity and ripeness levels and skin thicknesses were very different in each year.   

Mançanita makes a convincing argument for his case based on historic practices. He believes ‘there’s a conflict between [living] memory and [more distant] history’ as per the current DOC rules requiring skin contact until St. Martin’s Day.  He reckons how talha were used in the past were probably much more liberal. 

Regardless of differences in viewpoints concerning this subject, there is enough room for both talha approaches to co-exist. It’s pretty clear Mançanita doesn’t aim to change the DOC rules and is perfectly content to go his own way making the kind of wine he wants to make using talha the way they suit him. 

Tasting his hybrid talha-made white wines back to 2011 it is remarkable that all are still relatively fresh and lively for their age.

Fitapreta Wines

Fitapreta Signature Branco de Talha 2019 

Fitapreta Signature Branco de Talha 2018 

Fitapreta Signature Branco da Talha 2017 

Fitapreta Signature Branco da Talha 2015 

Fitapreta Signature Branco da Talha 2011 

Fitapreta O Tinto Pote de Barro 2016