Campolargo Vinhos: Exceptional wines of distinction from Dão, Portugal || Winery Portal


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Carlos Campolargo, Winemaker.

Our family has been working in viniculture and wine growing for several generations. We currently own over 170 hectares divided in two properties in central Portugal: Quinta de S. Mateus and Quinta de Vale d’ Azar.

Situated on Quinta de S. Mateus, our new wine cellar (September 2004) produces 300.000 bottles a year. We seek Bairrada DOC Certification for all our wines, so that we can proudly carry the name of our land, far and wide.

Our vineyards feature some foreign varieties along with several national ones (some of them from outside this region) such as: Baga, Touriga Nacional, and Tinta Roriz. As white varieties, we grow, Arinto, Bical, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc.

We produce wines of a single vineyard (the most part), with a first wine with high quality and cost and a second one with a major number of bottles and low cost. We also produce sparkling wines with the classic method.

Our History

Our grandfather Martinho, a farmer from Mogofores, produced red wine back in the early 1920’s. He was amongst this rare group of growers who would separate white from red grapes, producing a beautiful and renowned white wine. Both wines were sold in bulk to local merchants who would then bottle the wine.

Upon his death in the late 1960’s, our father Manuel took charge of the entire exploitation modernizing and expanding the vineyards abandoning, nonetheless, the wine market-oriented production.

In mid 1990’s we started testing the varieties planted in that meantime (many of which first time attempts in this region). Decision was taken to resume market-oriented wine production and to raise a new cellar.The first Campolargo wines resulted from 2000 crop, although the new cellar was only built in 2004.

Nowadays, the business lies in the hands of the third generation with Jorge Campolargo responsible for the vineyards and Carlos Campolargo heading the cellar and sales. Joana Campolargo impersonates the collaboration of the fourth generation ensuring administrative support and external relations.

Therefore, we wish to maintain our wine production an exclusively family-run business.

Winemaking

We follow the EU's Integrated System of winemaking, where no synthetic yeasts, enzymes or bacteria are added to winemaking. Hand picked grapes are disinfected, most of the times totally destemmed and treaded with the help of two robots. Pumps and crushers are therefore excluded from our oenologic concept.

Built and designed by architect Carlos Ramos in September 2004, our cellar at Quinta de S. Mateus produces wine according to the most classical concept. The building fills an 18 meters high vertical cut in one of the vineyards hillsides facing south-west. The construction allows for the use of gravity in the entire winemaking process, from grape entrance to final pressing.

Red wines undergo natural malolatic fermentation in wood: in 300 litres casks or 4200 litres wooden vats, french or east-european oak, followed by aging in the a cellar.

White wines, hardly ever destemed, are decanted for an adequate period of time after pressing followed by stainless steel or barrel fermentation, the latest without climate control.

Sparkling wine is produced by the classic method of second fermentation in bottle after specially prepared base wines obtained from grapes cropped with a likely adequate degree and acidity level. Rose wines, still or sparkling, are always obtained from pressing.

Visitors can enjoy a circuit through the whole winemaking process described above and further on try our wines in the cellar gallery, at ground level by the vineyard, or 25 meters higher in the tasting room. From up there one can see an extraordinary panorama of soft hills covered by vineyards and, at far, the mountain range from Lousã to Caramulo up north.