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 parents on the land and drove his Uncle Chico's team of oxen, on a small family holding that produced milk, wine, vegetables and most of what the household ate. That is how he learned the whole calendar of the agricultural year, without anyone formally teaching it. The vineyard where his father made the 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 at the 2006 harvest, in a cellar improvised on the ground floor of his house, moved by the Baga of Bairrada. That first attempt led him to garage wines and settled his direction for good. Nineteen consecutive harvests of trials followed, testing methods of vinification and barrels of different types and origins against the region's own varieties. Out of that work came, in 2017, the Vinha das Penicas project. The first wines 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.”