Colares - The Wine That Is No More (almost)

The testy Atlantic rhythmically slaps the southern Portuguese coast under a flannel-grey sky. The ocean winds carry the briney spray to the little hillock on which you stand gazing out over the rippled, churning foam. A bit to your left, just down the coast, you can see Lisbon clearly through the mist. You look down toward your sandy perch and see…nothing…well, at least no vines. Vines? Who in their right oenological mind would be looking for vines here? Well, if you’re one of the Portuguese conoscenti, you WOULD be, and with great urgency too. This is, or was, depending on who you talk to, the location of one of the world’s most unusual growing zones, and one of the world’s rarest appellations to boot. This is Colares (pronounced ko - LAH - resh).

As can be clearly understood by the imagery above, the Colares zone is located directly on the sea, not near it, but RIGHT ON the sea coast, and in many cases, right on the beach! The question that you’ve undoubtedly formed is “Why”? Why would anyone try to plant vines on a windswept, chilly beach? And the only answer that anyone could give is “that’s the way that God made Ramisco”. Ramisco is the sole (red) grape variety that makes Colares (EXTREMELY small quantities of white Colares is made from the one of the Malvasia varieties) . Ramisco, for whatever reason, thrives in this most unusual terroir - it’s a beach baby that NEEDS extremely sandy soils to flourish, and has a great resistence to the rot that salty sea air would visit on most vines. And because Ramisco thrives in sand, and Phylloxera (the root eating louse that is the scourge of viticulture) does not, no Ramisco vine has ever had to be grafted to the lower quality, but Phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks. This makes Ramisco perhaps the only cultivar that is vitis vinifera, 100% intact. And with all this strangeness, it comes as no surprise that Ramisco’s care and feeding are as unusual as the place it chooses as home…

If one does actually get a chance to eyeball a Colares vineyard, it would look more like a WWI-era battle trench at Ypres or Verdun than a row of Cabernet vines in Napa. The first thing one sees in a Colares vineyard are long, 6 foot tall berms of sand. Only when one looks over the top and below these berms does one actually see any vines. When you get right down to it, these vines are technically “underground”! To protect the vine’s arms and the fruit that grows there from the often savage winds that blow off of the Atlantic ocean, when Ramisco is planted, trenches that take the place of “rows” are dug in a parallel fashion into the beach. The tailings from these operations are then piled up to form these long berms on the seaward side of the trench to serve as wind breaks for the vines.

So it might be becoming clearer why Colares is now more a legend than a reality. First, it is very difficult to get anyone to plant Colares vines. Digging 7 to 10 feet down into pure sand is not only just slightly easier than herding cats, it’s also potentially very dangerous, with the constant risk of collapsing trenches, and therefore, buried diggers. And moving along the timeline a bit, because of the sandy trenches, the harvest in Colares is much slower going than in most other viticultural zones. The next hurdle is the near impossibility to employ any kind of economy of scale: the beach is only so deep, and clearly, planting vines right in the breaking surf is impossible, so by it’s nature the production of Colares is a cottage industry. There is little to no room to grow, so there is absolutely no drive to do so, and as we know miniscule production = high cost. Further, in the near past, nearly all of the Colares production was done through a government cooperative winery that was set up, at least in theory, to thwart counterfeiting. But the government cooperative did little to maximize the quality of the wines, and much to unfairly funnel obscene quantities of the wine into the cellars of just a few of Antonio Salazar’s cronies. The last fundamental reason for the Colares’ myth is something as mundane as real estate prices. As I mention above, Colares is within spitting distance of Lisbon. Since Portugal’s accession to the European Union and the flush of money that this change brought, Lisbon’s population has grown exponentially and as is true anywhere, it’s easier and cheaper to build on undeveloped land outside the city than it is to demolish and build in center city, so Colares is rapidly being covered over by toney townhouses and 4 bedroom houses.

So what is Colares like in the glass? Good question. I personally have only tasted it once, in Portugal, at the house of a friend of a friend, and the bottle we drank was pushing 10 years old then (this was in 1990). The wine is fairly lightly colored - about like a Pinot Noir - but MUCH more tannic and spicily exotic and with a fascinating, ethereal bouquet…obviously, an informal and abbreviated tasting note from a one-off tasting cannot even hope to capture such a fascinating wine, but deal with it - none of us are likely to ever get a chance to taste one (again?). IN THEORY Colares is still produced, but even with all of my contacts in the wine world, as well as with friends in Portugal, despite the promises, I have never been able secure even ONE more bottle of Colares wine. It is THAT rare. As one might expect, a few wealthy, big-cellared individuals, and a handful of top Lisbon restaurants buy it all before bottle one ever hits a shelf…So, if you see bottle of Colares, BUY IT…and then send me an e-mail immediately!

TOM CIOCCO