Encruzado Reserva

The white of Quinta da Falorca, the brand under which QVE, Quinta Vale das Escadinhas, bottles the fruit of its Silgueiros estate in the Dão. The house traces itself through five generations to the union of the Silva Costa and Barros de Figueiredo families late in the twentieth century. Wine left the property in bulk until 1963 and then went to the Adega Cooperativa de Silgueiros until 1998; it has been bottled under the estate's own labels only since 1999, when the holding was turned into a company and a winery built around a set of traditional granite lagares. It works 13 hectares of its own fruit, planted at 3,500 to 4,000 vines per hectare, and puts out 70,000 to 80,000 bottles a year. Farming is certified integrated production, not organic.

Silgueiros is one of the seven sub-regions of the Dão, made up of five freguesias in the municipality of Viseu, and the producer puts it at around 500 metres on granite - the soil under almost the whole region, which the regional commission gives as 97 percent granitic. The bottle is labelled simply Dão DOP. Encruzado is the region's leading white grape and is barely grown anywhere else; the commission calls it the most balanced variety in the Dão and credits it with real ageing potential.

Reserva means less here than it looks. Under the Dão rules it is a vintage-dated wine that shows distinctive organoleptic character and whose acquired alcohol runs at least half a degree above the legal minimum, tracked in its own account. Nothing in the term requires oak, lees or time, and the contrast is deliberate: the neighbouring terms in the same list do carry ageing minimums, Garrafeira asking twelve months for a white and Velho two years. The label prose describes only a direct, gentle pressing of fresh Encruzado picked and selected from the vineyard around the house, and a long fermentation at low temperature.

The producer's published sheet for this wine covers the 2022 rather than this vintage. There it was 98 percent Encruzado with a little Malvasia Fina, hand-picked into 18 kg boxes, given a day of natural cooling in the cellar, gently pressed, fermented for 29 days between 10 and 16 C, then held 90 percent in steel and 10 percent in 225 litre French oak for three months. Merchant sheets for the 2023 repeat that text almost word for word while swapping the ageing line to 80 percent steel and 20 percent for five months in the same barrels, which is reason enough to treat the change with care; no producer source confirms it. What this bottle adds on its own authority is that 4,191 numbered bottles were made and that it was filled on 22 August 2024.