Over the last three decades Rui Reguinga has been a staunch champion of the cooler mountainous grape-growing region of Portalegre; its old, nearly abandoned, vineyards, and its local talha winemaking traditions. It is fitting that Reguinga has recently established his own adega just a hundred meters or so from the ruined 1st century Roman town of Ammaia. With its amphora and clay winemaking pots still intact, this historically important archaeological site anchors Portalegre’s ‘northern’ talha culture in the ancient past just as Saõ Cucufate does for Southern Alentejo’s talha culture. 

Reguinga notes: ‘Until the 1970s, most wine was made in talhas.’ He mourns the corresponding sharp decline in local grape production. Around 400ha (1,000 acres) in its heyday, this slipped to 46ha (113 acres) by 1989 and has only recently returned to 622ha in 2020. Regardless of their diminished size, the surviving older vineyards are important preserves of local biodiversity and grape preferences as well as historical farming traditions. 

It was providential that Reguinga began his first harvest at Portalegre’s most venerable old estate, Tapada do Chaves, in 1991, with its magnificent 120-year-old vineyard. Since then the experience he gained throughout his career has reinforced his belief in the superiority of grapes produced from vines of this age. 

A third-generation winemaker, Reguinga studied grape-growing at Lisbon Institute of Agronomy,  followed by post-graduate winemaking studies at Portuguese Catholic University and Bordeaux University. He has made wine throughout a wide range of Portugal’s main regions (Tejo, Dao, Douro, Madeira, Alentejo) and forayed far beyond into the greater world of wine: Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, Bordeaux. The end result of all this has led to a breadth of winemaking experience with a variety of grape varieties grown under a wide range of cool and hot climatic conditions and soil types.  

Reguinga sums up the advantages of this diverse career, ‘I believe that the greater the experience a winemaker has outside the lands he knows, the greater his capacity to confront new situations. I began by being fascinated with the style of the New World but in the last years have returned to my origins.’ Joni Mitchell summed up a similar sentiment once, ‘you don’t know what you got, till it’s gone.’ 

Which sends me back to my first meeting with Rui Reguinga over a decade ago. He had taken me up a long and winding road near Porto da Espada in the Parque Natural da Serra de São Mamede. The destination, his pride and joy, a 90-year-old field blend vineyard named Vinha da Serra, that few at that point were interested in working, let alone owning. It clung tightly to a very steep slope (760m) just below the crest of the last ridge that stared off into the barren western plains of Spain. As we sat amongst the ancient vines, their battered old gnarly limbs, stunted from relentless wind, cold nights and even colder winters, my thoughts turned back to the special ‘old vine’ wine I’d drunk earlier at his adega. The hostile environment up there and the creaky old plants it produced were key to the tiny amounts of highly concentrated juice produced that made the wine so magical. 

The key to understanding Reguinga’s wine is understanding the primacy of the grapes that come from these old vineyards. The point is not letting winemaking get in the way of seeing those grapes as clearly as possible.  

As a journeyman winemaker who long ago mastered the art of ‘modern’ technologically driven ‘internationalist’ wine styles and worked his way through all the trends and fads involved with them, he is now convinced that talha allow you to ‘feel the strength and purity’ of a wine more clearly: ‘You find more minerality and freshness. You get the grapes as they are. You feel the greenness if unripe, which I like, because they aren’t tempered by barrels. It shows the terroir and season much more.’ For him ‘barrels kill everything...aroma, complexity,’ and so he’s steadily moved away from that dominating influence. 

After paying his dues as a contract winemaker Reguinga has finally achieved his ‘dream...to have my own winery.’ The new adega, overlooking Ammaia’s ruins, was converted from a 1950s-era coffee-roasting factory, conveniently located close to Spain, ‘so the coffee could be more easily smuggled across the border.’ The winery isn’t exclusively focused on talha wine, having a mix of small stainless steel tanks, a large, neutral wooden cone-shaped vessel, a biodynamic concrete egg, and Artenova’s modern adaptation of a Roman Dolium fermentation pot from Tuscany. Each has a different role to play in his various old vine wines. 

Terrenus has two talha. The newest (600 liter) is used for whites. It’s dated 1859, produced and stamped by a master from the greatest northern center of talha-making in the 19th century, Campo Mayor. His reds have been made in a 2000-liter talha since 2014, which has since been transplanted to the new adega. Reguinga light-heartedly grumbles that they are ‘not easy to move.’

Where previously his talha wines were reds, he has just made his first white.  He experimented several years ago making an ‘orange wine,’ which used a three-month-long maceration and wasn’t happy with the results. ‘Maceration loses the freshness...you need to find the balance,’ and that involves ‘reading’ each wine for its individuality. ‘If there's too much maceration, it’s not nice. Freshness is important,’ continuing, ‘I like the pure freshness of the grape.’  Having learned a lesson from too much orangeness, his new white talha wine, based on an old vine field blend, ‘doesn’t use so much maceration.’  He added that keeping the wine in talha until November 11 is ‘not easy’ given Portalegre’s cooler climate and later harvest dates.  

His red is ‘fermented in talha [certified after St. Martin's Day], then aged in smaller Artenova’s amphora for 7-8 months.’  It is interesting that Artenova’s Dolium-shaped pots are remarkably similar to those in Ammaia’s nearby museum. 

‘Buying old vineyards takes time. You have to develop a relationship with the owners,’ Reguinga explains the trust and respect involved in any handover of stewardship. It’s taken a while, but he has recently added two new ‘old’ vineyards alongside his original Vinha da Serra. Both are within a couple of kilometers (mile plus) of his adega. 

The younger vineyard is named Vinha da Ammaia, a 60-year-old mixed field blend reserved for his talha wines: including whites Roupeiro, Arinto and Bical and reds Trincadeira, Moreto, and Castelão. The second is much older at 120 years, named Clos dos Muros, and includes: Gran Noir, Trincadeira, Aragonez, Moreto, Tinta Grossa, Alicante Bouschet, Castelão, Tinta Carvalha, Alfrocheiro, Corropio, and Tinta Francesa. 

Of these, the last five reds plus whites, Arinto and Bical, are more common in north Alentejo blends than in south. They shape talha wine differently than those from further south. 

Reguinga firmly believes that the combination of talha and local old vineyards is ‘the new way’ for Portalegre to reclaim its own distinctive future. 

Rui Reguinga Wines

Terrenus Vinha da Ammaia 1859 Amphora Branco 2022 

Terrenus Vinha da Ammaia 1859 Amphora Branco 2021 

Terrenus Vinha da Ammaia 1859 Amphora Tinto 2022 

Terrenus Vinha da Ammaia 1859 Amphora Tinto 2021 

Terrenus Vinha da Ammaia Tinto 2018 

Terrenus Amphora Tinto 2014