Do you love a good wine story? Casa Ferreirinha offers a great one in the form of its founder, Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira. She was the formidable 19th-century woman who helped shape the Portuguese family’s wine business at a time when wine was very much a man’s world.

Today, nearly two centuries later, that same spirit of looking ahead still defines the house. Their challenge is preserving freshness and identity in one of Portugal’s hottest, driest regions in the face of climate change.

When the Douro Meant Port

For centuries, the Douro was virtually synonymous with Port. Yet in 1952, winemaker Fernando Nicolau de Almeida decided to attempt serious, age-worthy dry red wine.

Temperature control was essential, and modern winery refrigeration was not an option. The solution involved transporting ice into the hot Douro to help control fermentation.  

The result was Barca-Velha, the wine that would ultimately become Casa Ferreirinha’s icon and help establish the potential of non-fortified Douro wines present very much today.

Going Up the Mountain

The Douro is dramatic wine country: steep mountains, terraces cut into the hillsides and vineyards rooted in schist. It is also hot, particularly as one travels east into the Douro Superior, where rainfall can be extremely scarce.

Traditionally, a prized vineyard might have been planted lower on the slope with a southern exposure, seeking maximum sun and ripeness. Today, explained the Casa Ferreirinha team during the tasting, some of those assumptions are being turned around.

As temperatures rise and heat waves become more frequent, growers are looking to plant vines higher on the hills. Higher-altitude vineyards offer cooler conditions, while north-facing sites can now provide valuable protection during the hottest part of the day.

This isn’t theoretical. The recently released 2017 Reserva Especial came primarily from Quinta da Leda and higher-altitude parcels during an exceptionally hot, dry vintage. Casa Ferreirinha credits altitude, along with vineyard and winery decisions, with helping preserve the wine’s freshness.

The Douro’s complicated geography suddenly looks less like an obstacle and more like an enormous toolbox.

Schist, Old Grapes and New Tricks

Then there is the soil.

Much of the Douro is dominated by schist, a compressed, layered rock that hardly looks welcoming to a grapevine. Yet the fractured vertical layers allow roots to work downward over time, searching for water and nutrients.

The grape varieties provide another form of insurance. Portugal is famous for its wealth of indigenous grapes, and old Douro vineyards may contain dozens growing together in traditional field blends.

That diversity, once useful because different grapes responded differently to disease or difficult growing conditions, has become newly relevant. Some varieties tolerate heat better. Others hold acidity or cope more effectively with drought.

Casa Ferreirinha combines those old resources with some distinctly modern ones. Drones fly over vineyards to identify differences in vine vigor. Weather stations gather data throughout the growing season. An experimental collection of Touriga Nacional clones helps researchers study how the variety behaves under changing conditions.

One of my favorite examples involves bees. Yes, that pesky stinging insect.

Beehives equipped for monitoring allow the team to study the diversity of pollen brought back from around the estate, offering another window into the health and biodiversity of the landscape.

It is an appealing mixture: satellites and bees, ancient grapes and climate stations.