Freire Lobo

“The only option was to go to the middle of town,” she recalls. Whatever fate had in store for her vineyards, she’d have to wait until daybreak to discover.

Her parents had brought her to this deep mountain valley when Elisa was 15 days old.  Its smells and sounds had reverberated through a childhood spent outdoors: farm families singing their way through harvest season, sucking on bees wax after the honey haul, treading grapes in autumn. Winemaking lay outside her family’s purview, but it captured Elisa’s curiosity as she ranged further afield in adulthood. After working and studying in Bairrada and Douro, she decided to come back home to Dão, where she established herself as the first woman winemaker in the region. 

In 2010 she set about restoring her family’s land, where olive groves and grazing pastures alternated with vines dating as far back as 1956. She looked at those sandy, granitic hillsides, pitched between 560 and 600 meters above sea level, and felt that they could produce a sort of wine that so many other Portuguese producers seemed tragically eager to abandon. “I remember tasting in 2010, and you’d find whites from Dão that smelled just like whites from Douro,” she recalls. “Everything was the same everywhere—because everybody was using the same yeast, the same treatments, the same oak.”

She knew her region had a particular character—she’d tasted it in bottles from the 1970s and 1980s, whose elegance was so distinctive, so present, that it felt “like the wines were talking to us.” But she would have to depart from the modern status quo to recover it. 

Elisa spent the first four years just “cleaning the land”—letting the residual herbicides wash out as she transitioned to organic methods. To coax her nutrient-poor soils into holding at least a little water, she let 300 Bordaleiras sheep graze and fertilize the vineyards over winter, and she cover-cropped in spring. Tiny white daisies began poking up between the vine rows as earthworms recolonized the topsoil. In 2014 she harvested her first vintage, working exclusively with traditional Dão red and white varietals. But she considered that year and the next two as a period of experimentation—foot-treading to promote gentle extraction and soft tannins, spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts, co-fermentation in traditional open-topped lagares, stainless steel maturation to emphasize freshness and purity.

The 2017 vintage had been the turning point. She finally felt it all clicking together, including the multi-varietal blends that delivered the elegance and verve she was seeking. The structure and acidity of Encruzado forms the “spine” of her Vigno Branco white, to which Bical adds a velvety roundness and Cerceal provides fruit and floral aromatics, in a wine whose persistent minerality fosters impressions of citrus, herbs and salted pear. Her Vigno Tinto uses tannic Touriga Nacional and fruity Alfrochiero as a taut springboard for the lifted floral perfume of Jaen (known as Mencía on the Spanish side of the border). Dão reds have a lean delicacy that’s often likened to Burgundies, but Elisa correctly insists that neither her red nor white really resembles another wine from a better-known region. What she is doing is unique to the eastern foothills of mainland Portugal’s highest mountain. 

That barely two months separated her 2017 harvest from the October wildfires shows just how thin a line every small-scale winemaker walks. When Elisa woke the next morning, some 800 square miles had gone up in smoke in central Portugal—including half of her vineyards. 

She stumbled through the wreckage shell-shocked. “The first thing I thought was, ‘This is a disaster. I’m done,’” she recalls. But then her mind turned in another direction. Some of the 1956 plantings had survived. And maybe there was an opportunity hiding in her losses—maybe she could coax a phoenix from these ashes. So her second thought was: “Let’s work. Let’s correct what needs correcting. Let’s do some things differently. Let’s take it to the next level.”

Wasting no time, she tuned her new plantings to the blends she’d taken so long to land on—and added some other traditional grapes including Bastardo and Baga, a thin-skinned, high-strung red varietal known for length and longevity in the bottle. She set about restoring some ancient granite lagares to use in the cellar. She established new beehives, adding honey to her sheep cheese and olive production—and pollinators to her vineyards. Lately she’s been shopping for clay vats, thinking they may have a role to play in her cellar. 

“The wine is made in the vineyard,” Elisa emphasizes. “If I have good plants and production, then in the winery I just have to be there to see and smell, and make wine with the lowest intervention.

“But I’m always experimenting,” she adds, with the energetic resolve that marks everything she does and makes. “I’m always thinking about what to do differently. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always been learning and defining my own way. Every challenge just moves us to think about getting better.”