Alberto Almeida
A vineyard called Penicas.
The project began long before it existed. It began in the seventies, in a village in the Coimbra municipality at the southern edge of Bairrada, with a child picking up shells between the vines.
Alberto Almeida was born in São Martinho de Árvore. As a child he helped his family, who worked the land for wine, vegetables and milk. That is how he learned the whole calendar of the agricultural year, without anyone formally teaching it. The vineyard where his father made the house wine was called Penicas.
Then came the city. He trained and built a career in mental health, as a psychodramatist, a profession he never left and still practises. But around thirty, a longing for that calendar began pulling him back.
In 1997 he moved to Podentes, in the Penela municipality, and found what he had not expected to find: century-old ungrafted vineyards, ten or more varieties planted intermingled, some of which nobody could still name. Vineyards nobody wanted, because they cannot be mechanised and they yield little. He began buying them and bringing them back.
He made his first wine in 2006, in a cellar improvised on the ground floor of his house, moved by Baga. Eleven years of learning passed before he showed anyone anything. The Vinha das Penicas project was formally born in 2017. The first wines, a white and a red from that year, were only presented in 2020, after waiting as long as seemed right.
Today it is around ten thousand bottles a year. It could be more, and it is not: the restraint is deliberate, so as not to grow beyond what the cellar and the available hands can follow.
“I don’t want to make eccentric wines. I want to transmit emotion and challenge sensations.”