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Buçaco - A. Almeida Hotels
The Bussaco Palace, near Coimbra, was commissioned by King Carlos I in the late 19th century to serve as a country residence. However, before he could move in, Portugal became a republic and the Palace was renamed a luxury hotel in 1917. That hotel also started making its own wines, which grew to become cult.
The initial plan was to have some sort of "house wine" for hotel guests. Since the hotel in Luso is right on the border of the Dão and Bairrada regions, wine from both regions was purchased. These were blended and aged in the hotel's cellars in large wooden casks.
As time went on, it dawned on us that those wines from the hotel were anything but ordinary.
We discovered the wines in the early 2000s when Filipa Pato took us out for dinner at the hotel. The hotel's cellar was full of bottles going back even to the hotel's early days.
The quality of those old wines proved exceptional. Red wines from the 1950s and 1960s showed themselves in top form and were a joy to drink. But especially the white wines evoked wonder.
Bottles of white from 1955 and 1958, for example, turned out to be of the very highest quality. So not only were the wines delicious in their youth, they were able to age endlessly and only got better as a result. The secret seemed to be in blending the tighter style Bairrada wine with the rounder, finer Dãos.
At the time, you could only drink Buçaco's wines locally. In 2008, it was decided to increase production slightly so that several thousand bottles could also be marketed with each harvest.
We were in the front row to secure an allocation and now have 300 bottles of white and as many reds annually.
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