Bem Vindo a Cortes de Cima, a family owned and run vineyard and winery located in Alentejo, Southern Portugal. We strive to capture the abundant Alentejan sunshine in the vineyard, where we start making our wines. Our work is finished off in the winery, where the grapes are carefully handled to preserve the concentrated color, aroma and fruit flavor of the ripe Alentejan grapes.
We aim to use our website, blog, to tell you about what is going on in the vineyards and the winery from the people who actually work here on a daily basis. We would love for you to leave us a comment, to let us know what you think about our wines and our olive oil, use it as a visitors guestbook if you have visited us, or just to say Ola.
We would like to say ‘sayonara‘ to the outgoing Japanese ambassador to Portugal and his wife, Mr. Hara Satoshi and Mrs. Hara Michiko. During the ambassador´s tenure in Portugal he confesses to not only having developed a great fondness for the country, the people, the nature, but also for the wines. This special interest in Portuguese wines, brought them to Cortes de Cima last December, when we were honoured to receive them here as guests for our Annual Danish Christmas Lunch. The winery tour conducted by Hans, was followed by a wine tasting and paired with Chef Bjarne Otto’s scrumptious Danish christmas buffet lunch.
“Among many others, Portugal will be remembered with: Deep blue sky at Arrábida mountains (Sétubal); thrilling rides on electrico No.28 in Lisboa; roaring crashed pure white waves at Ilha Berlenga (Peniche); magnificent panorama of Lisbon Bay from Casa da Cerca (Almada); unobstructed view of Açores islands from the summit of Portugal’s highest Monte Pico; solemn tranquility inside Convento de Santa Maria da Vitória (Batalha); sweating mountain walk of Pico Ruivo (Madeira) with cliffs, cliffs and clifs; leisurely sip of Vinho Tinto watching beautiful flying cegonhas (storks) in Comporta (Tróia).” - Ambassador HARA Satoshi
Japan was one of our earliest export markets, we started exporting wines to Harimaya in Osaka in 2001.
コルテス・デ・シーマ 赤 = translation = Cortes de Cima in Japanese!
We are excited to be one of the sponsors behind the upcoming “BeBare” originally “Vancouver’s naughtiest fashion show”, this year taking place in New York (9th Oct) and Vancouver (20th Nov), where Chaminé will be served. Top designer fashions will be auctioned right off the models bodies, leaving them in their finest, sexiest lingerie! All in the name of charity!
ROSE CHARITIES is a grassroots organization based out of Vancouver, BC, founded over 20 years ago by the family of international supermodel, Noot Seear. With 12 chapters world-wide, ROSE CHARITIES provides corneal transplants and cleft palate surgeries in Cambodia and Vietnam, street children and prison drug rehab in Nepal, school building in Madagascar and more.
$100 donated for the eye clinic means 5 Cambodians will get their cataracts removed. Or $200 will send a Sri Lankan student to university for a year, $1000 to the micro-credit fund will give loans to up to 30 families a year, in perpetuity.
PS- We would also like to thank our importers in New York, Tri-Vin, and in Vancouver, Whitefish, for their logistical support in helping to supply the wines to the 2 events.
We finally managed to organize the visit of part of the Adegga.com team, André Ribeirinho and Emídio Santos, to Cortes de Cima despite being very busy with the ongoing harvest. They represent a new generation of wine enthusiasts with a good level of knowledge and, above all, new ideas and projects that deserve our attention.
After a tour of the winery, our guests enjoyed a motorized “safari” through the vineyard guided by António Claúdio and followed by an amazing flight with Hans, who wished to show our guests a different perspective of the vineyard. At landing there was happiness in their faces.
And then we finally started working - a detailed presentation of the Adegga project - on which we are already a Premium member and an example. There’s another interesting project related to this one, the creation of a Unique Code for each wine, like an ISBN for books. It’s called AVIN. It’s a very interesting project that also includes a mobile code. This mobile code puts together a visual code, like a barcode, the QR Code, , and the AVIN unique code. A QR Code contains a link to access information about a specific wine on Adegga.com. This way information about a wine can easily be accessed with any mobile phone requiring only a free application that recognizes the code. It’s as simple as taking a picture and following the link that will take you to the wine information.
So, we have invited André and Emídio to use our wines as Guinea pigs for a few pilot tests. The first of these will take place on the 24th October, during Vinipax in Beja, and if all goes as planned we will be doing a second test during the Encontro com o Vinho e Encontro com os Sabores, that will happen at Junqueira in Lisbon.
We will give more news about these tests around that time!
We are excited to learn that Cortes de Cima has been selected for the International Wine and Spirit Competition’s Portuguese Wine Producer Trophy short list. The other 3 runner-ups are Vinhos Barbeito, Henriques and Henriques, and Symington Family Estates and the results will be anounced at a banquet on 17th November at London´s Guildhall. Our nomination is based on our achieving our best results ever at this year’s competition, 3 Gold Medals all in ‘Best in Class’ and 3 Silver Medals, 1 of which was ‘Best in Class’.
We want to extend a warm welcome to the blogging world to The Spanish Table in Berkeley , even if they are, in their own words, “the last person in the Bay Area to get a blog“. The Spanish Table is a mecca for Iberian food and wines, with stores located in Seattle, Berkeley, Santa Fe, and Mill Valley. The people involved in the company are all passionate Iberian aficionados, traveling often to Iberia to further their knowledge of the food and wine (they have visited us here), or for other passions, like a flamingo guitar study tour to Granada.
In the first post on their new blog, we are pleased to note that they have included a review of Chaminé tinto 2007, which, like our olive oil, is available in their Berkeley store. They correctly point out that U.C.Berkeley is my alma mater.
Mill Valley, Marin County, is the location of The Spanish Table’s most recent store, (where our wines and olive oils are also available). Mill Valley is also my home town, where I was born and raised, and spent my childhood. What goes around comes around, one more time!
A brief mid September update and some new vineyard photos.
As you can see in the photos, our vines are still in a good healthy state, with their working canopy helping the grapes to finish the most important stage of the ripening process, the phenolic maturity, or development of the grape flavor, color, aroma and tannin. In a warm climate grape growing region like the Alentejo, ripeness cannot be measured only by the simple method of measuring sugar level (or Baumé), because these levels are often achieved prior to reaching satisfactory phenolic maturity. If we only guided ourselves with the sugar and alcohol levels to determine our picking time, the result would be green, hard tannin and unripe flavors in the wine - which our wine fans do not enjoy!
As we head into autumn, the days here are turning noticeably shorter, but luckily, the fantastic harvest weather continues - with warm, dry days and cooler nights. Vine plants work best in a temperature range between 16 and 25 degrees, which is just what we have been experiencing during September. However how long the good weather continues, is anyone’s guess. This is the sort of situation when it pays to have a Viking in the family. Hans with his Danish ‘nerves of steel’ refuses to hurry things up, preferring to run the gamble with the weather.
So although most grape growers in the area have rushed into harvest full speed, and many of our neighbors have even finished the year’s harvest by now, we have only harvested our white grapes to date, and are just beginning, at a relaxed ‘Alentejan’ pace with the earliest red varieties.
The winery crew is jittery, anxious to see the fermenting tanks filled to capacity, with the sight and smells of the purple grapes, skin, pulp and juice. In the meantime, they busy themselves lavishing extra care on pumping over and punch down of the few early ferments already bubbling away in the winery.
We would like to say ‘sayonara‘ to the outgoing Japanese ambassador to Portugal and his wife, Mr. Hara Satoshi and Mrs. Hara Michiko. During the ambassador´s tenure in Portugal he confesses to not only having developed a great fondness for the country, the people, the nature, but also for the wines. This special interest in Portuguese wines, brought them to Cortes de Cima last December, when we were honoured to receive them here as guests for our Annual Danish Christmas Lunch. The winery tour conducted by Hans, was followed by a wine tasting and paired with Chef Bjarne Otto’s scrumptious Danish christmas buffet lunch.
