Alentejo ‘transformed’ by WASP programme
Southern Portugal’s Alentejo region is the cradle of one of the wine world’s most impressive and comprehensive sustainable development initiatives, writes Louis Thomas.
There is no single wine style that typifies Alentejo. Constituting a sizeable part of southern Portugal, Alentejo’s geographical extent, alongside its plethora of grape varieties, ranging from the white Antão Vaz and Arinto to the red Aragonez (better known as Tempranillo) and Alicante Bouschet, as well as the creative freedom enjoyed by its winemakers, means that there is no clear thread that stitches the wines of the region together.
However, Alentejo’s wine industry is increasingly able to be defined by something else – a philosophy or mindset. The Wines of Alentejo Sustainability Programme (WASP) has been a driving force behind this. Under the directorship of João Barroso, this voluntary initiative has been in the works for more than a decade, but it has only just begun.
What follows is far from an exhaustive account of what each of the 27 producers certified with WASP are doing, but rather a glimpse of some of the methods, both obvious and surprising, that Alentejo wine businesses are using to ensure long-term success.
Water scarcity
Despite its stylistic diversity, Alentejo has one key defining characteristic. “The particularity of Alentejo is what’s missing: water,” says António Maçanita, winemaker at Fitapreta. “Man can move mountains, and we can irrigate, but we must learn to work with what we have.”
Some producers have more water than others, of course. As the name suggests, 20% of Herdade dos Lagos’ 1,000-hectare estate is, when water levels are at their maximum, covered by five artificial lakes, the oldest constructed a century ago. “We don’t do dry farming,” explains farm manager Helena Manuel. “In years when it rains 250mm, it’s impossible to do dry farming – we would have to have 350mm of rain and a different type of soil. Ours is a hard mixture of clay, schist and sand, which is like concrete when it compacts, so it needs a lot of organic matter to un-compact it.”
Climate change has made concerns over water management all the more urgent – some data points to Alentejo’s average annual rainfall having declined by 150mm in the last 30 years, while its maximum temperatures have risen by 5°C, although minimum temperatures are slightly lower than they were in the 1990s. As well as the use of sensors to provide live updates on moisture levels in the soil, one method which Herdade dos Lagos, alongside many WASP-certified producers, swears by is cover cropping – that is, the encouragement of plant growth between the vine rows.
“Cover crops are not weeds; they were there before the vines,” argues Herdade dos Grous viticulturist Luis Constantino. “Make them part of the system. Don’t work against them.”
Bat boxes
Like many of the estates certified through WASP, Tapada de Coelheiros, located just north of Alentejo’s regional capital of Évora, resembles a nature reserve more than a conventional vineyard, with bat boxes, wild boar trails and the abundance of deer droppings all offering hints to the range of local residents. However, what Tapada de Coelheiros has fostered beneath the surface of its 53ha of vineyard is even more impressive than the biodiversity above it.
As João Raposeira, agricultural manager, points out, cover cropping is not just good for water retention, but for soil health as a whole. “If you want to boost the diversity of micro-organisms in the soil, you use different plants for cover cropping – legume plants for nitrates and a mix of different flowers to attract different insects,” he explains. “We don’t have a recipe; we adapt to the plot, grape variety and year. We have to create a little bit of chaos to bring balance and resilience.”
In a region which gets very hot during the summer – having experienced two prolonged heatwaves this year – cover cropping also provides a further advantage for protecting the grapes, says Raposeira: “If you came here in August when it was 40°C, it’s possible for the soil to reach 60°C–70°C at the surface when you plough – it’s impossible to have micro-organisms at the surface but, if you have trimmed cover crops, the temperature goes down to 50°C. If you retain the most cover crops, it’s down to 40°C.”
Eco trailblazer: João Barroso is the director of the WASP programme
The dryness of the climate is certainly an asset for practitioners of organic viticulture, as the lower humidity means a substantially reduced risk of fungal disease ahead of harvest.
Despite this, none of the above is necessarily easy to manage. But for Raposeira, sustainability is an approach, rather than a checklist of tasks to accomplish. “People think working in regenerative and organic farming is a lot of work, but we have to change the mentality – nature gives you the signs and you respond,” he says.
Producers using soil sensors to enable precision irrigation find it’s also a way to cut waste. As Herdade Paço do Conde export sales manager Jorge Rosado says: “It’s sustainable – if you don’t need, you don’t use.”
Community support
Supporting the natural world is just one part of sustainable development – the human side of it can be all too easily overlooked. The initiatives that WASP-certified producers use to support their local communities are certainly eclectic.
One shining example is Cartuxa, which produces around six million bottles of wine each year and reinvests much of the profit from that into Évora, including supporting scholarships and even sponsoring the local rugby team. This was not caused by some Damascene moment on the road to sustainability certification, but has been a fixture of the business since 1963, when then owner Vasco Maria Eugénio de Almeida, finding himself without an heir to take over, set up his eponymous foundation. The fact that it is still going six decades later is a testament to how well it has worked.
Likewise, as tempting as it is to think of sustainable development as a new-fangled concept, it can take several lifetimes for its success to become apparent. Fortunately, Alentejo’s oldest active producer, Mouchão, has had a head start of more than a century, with its winery, constructed in 1901, remaining largely unchanged ever since (electric lighting was only installed in 1991). Now under the sixth generation of ownership by the Reynolds Richardson family, with an interruption from 1974 to 1986 following Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, when Communists turned the winery into a cooperative, Mouchão has been a fixture of the area of Casa Branca for a long time.
The vineyard workers and pickers employed by Mouchão are from Casa Branca, undertaking the same work that their ancestors did. Current estate custodian Iain Reynolds Richardson quips: “We pay a bit better than some other estates – I hope that’s not the only reason. I’m a bit of a romantic, but they’re all local.”
Totally parched: Helena Manuel says dry farming is all but impossible in Alentejo
But WASP has undeniably encouraged significant behavioural changes from producers, particularly when it comes to their relationships with grape growers. Celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, cooperative Adega de Borba is a rather different beast to Mouchão, with the former working with around 240 growers across 2,200ha of vineyards. Remarkably, given its sheer scale, around 80% of its vineyard area is enrolled in WASP, a figure which could only be achieved by incentivising a large number of farmers.
Vineyard and associate manager Luis Gaspar explains: “We pay growers 10% more for grapes for undertaking the standard procedure of the sustainability programme. Normally they [the growers] are resistant at first, but they understand this will help to sell the wine, help the environment, and help them to make more money. When they start doing the maths, they know the grapes will have more value. For example, if they bring 10,000kg, they are getting paid for an extra 1,000kg.
“That’s how to convince them to change – once they start doing it, they understand why they do it. It’s not an extreme process, it’s a balance.”
Casa Relvas has a similar approach, as CEO Alexandre Relvas Jr reveals: “We didn’t change anything to get [WASP] certification. We just improved, taking small decisions for the next few months, because it’s a never-ending work. What is quite difficult is to convince the smaller farmers to participate.”
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In order to address the latter issue, Relvas offers training in sustainable viticulture and financial incentives to get growers on board. “We have all kinds of suppliers – the big investment company with a farm and the guy on the mountain with 2ha,” says Relvas Jr, who only offers long term contracts. “In the end, it’s all economic,” he says.
High energy
The economic arguments in favour of sustainable practices are especially apparent when one examines the ever-present issue of energy. In this sun-baked region, much of which is off the grid, using solar power is the obvious solution.
Among the producers to have invested in it is Herdade da Malhadinha Nova, in the Baixo Alentejo sub-region. This year the business spent some 7 00,000 on the installation of solar panels and batteries, which it predicts will cover 98% of its energy needs. A sizeable sum, certainly, but given that the estate’s annual electricity bill was typically 1 60,000, it is a purchase which will be paid off within a matter of years – well before the 20-year warranty on the equipment expires.
For some producers, Alentejo’s abundant sunshine means they have more electricity than they need to be self-sufficient, so they can sell the excess solar energy back to the electricity grid. Who says being eco doesn’t pay?
But a balance must be achieved – it can be counter-productive for some businesses to make a bottle too light. While Mouchão has reduced its bottle weight in recent years, it will not be lightening them to sub-400g. The reason for this is that lighter bottles tend to have thinner glass, making them more fragile and, according to Reynolds Richardson, at risk of breaking during transit to the warehouse, dousing the rest of the bottles in the cage in wine.
“The water we would have to use to rinse all the other bottles would be wasteful, so we have to compromise,” he explains.
Only part of the story
Glass is only part of the packaging story. Portugal has no shortage of closures thanks to the abundance of cork trees, with many Alentejo estates having their own forests. Some, such as Mouchão, use their trees to make corks for their own bottles, while others, including Tapada de Colheiros, harvest the cork trees and sell the material on to closure companies such as Amorim.
However they choose to use this material, the cork forests are managed with the same sustainable principles as the vineyards. This is also true for the olive groves planted on many estates. As for the capsule that surrounds the cork, some producers have opted for shorter ones which use less material. For Mainova, a boutique operation producing around 90,000 bottles a year, its small scale enables each of its bottles to be sealed with wax, which burns off when the bottle is melted during the recycling process.
Old and new: Mouchão may have a long history, but it is also innovative
Of course, the odds of every single producer in Alentejo joining WASP are slim – the certification requirements have been kept strict so as not to devalue the badge on the bottle. At present, around one-third (34%) of Alentejo’s wine production is certified through WASP, although almost two-thirds (63%) of the region’s 23,000ha of vineyard area is enrolled in the programme.
“The most important thing for the future of WASP is no greenwashing at all,” says Vasco Penha Garcia, winemaker and director of institutional relations of the Bacalhôa Group, which counts Alentejo estate Quinta do Carmo in its roster. “I would say it [WASP enrolment] is good because it helped us to introduce new ways of working. I think Alentejo can be the most sustainable region in the world – we have the climate, the forests; we have everything.”
From label backing to box
If you placed the sticker backings from the bottle labels for wines produced in Alentejo end-to-end, they would stretch for 15,000km – approximately the distance from Portugal to Alice Springs, Australia. Typically made from non-recyclable materials, this by-product is often burnt to dispose of it. One WASP-certified producer, Parras, identified this waste as a problem and partnered with a company, Partícula Verde, which would recycle the label backings to form pulp, which could then be turned into packaging. The initiative has proven so promising that now WASP itself has partnered with Partícula Verde to develop a wine bottle box, made from wine label backings.
Cutting emissions can also be achieved by changing production practices. Herdade dos Grous, the first company to achieve WASP certification, has made big alterations to its wine packaging in order to do this.
“Since 2018, we have decreased our carbon footprint from 3.5kg of CO2 per bottle down to 2.23kg because of the practices of reducing bottle weight by 195g, and we want to decrease it further,” says Miriam Mascarenhas, quality and sustainability manager.
Business sense
Arguments in favour of sustainable development often tend to have a certain piety about them – thou shalt strive to use lighter bottles, thou shalt not varnish thy cardboard – but the most compelling piece of reasoning is the cold, hard truth that it just makes good business sense. Cover cropping gives vineyards a greater resilience to drought, which is increasingly necessary in a changing climate; paying vine growers more for sustainably-cultivated grapes incentivises them to continue supplying your business; and installing the means of producing renewable energy can save a fortune in energy bills.
Being certified as sustainable can be very helpful for breaking into certain international markets too, especially in the alcohol monopolies of the Nordic nations and Canada.
Casa Clara, the first company to enrol in WASP, was one such beneficiary of this, says oenologist Alexandra Mendes. “Today it’s bringing good enterprise – we won one tender for Systembolaget in Sweden because we had WASP certification, so the investment paid off that year.”
Although its vineyards constitute only 0.3% of the world’s total vineyard area, when it comes to everything from viticultural management to working with the community, Alentejo punches well above its weight.
Fitapreta’s Maçanita neatly sums it up: “It’s the way we will ensure there are vineyards here for the next generation. There is no point in planting a vineyard that will only last 25 years. Investment is the balance between what you put in and what you take out.”
Constant process
And sustainability is not a one-time investment, but rather a constant process. Producers certified with WASP are subject to regular audits, both internal and external, and there is a real desire to continue to improve.
Visiting Mouchão, you would be forgiven for thinking that this most historic of wineries, with its well-trodden lagares and manual presses, is immune to innovation, but this is simply not the case. With ambitions to achieve carbon neutrality and possible plans to construct an underground warehouse to keep wine cool without the need for air conditioning, even a vinous time capsule such as this is moving with the times. As Reynolds Richardson puts it: “WASP has put a structure on our thinking – it keeps us Catholic, as they say.”
WASP comes to London
On Monday 20 October, there will be a landmark event showcasing the work of WASP, and the wines of certified producers, at the Nash Conservatory, Kew Gardens, London TW9 3AB. In addition to Mouchão’s Iain Reynolds Richardson, Alentejo Regional Winegrowing Commission president Luís Sequeira and WASP director João Barroso, db editor-in-chief Patrick Schmitt MW will also be speaking at the event. Talks are due to take place between 2pm and 3.15pm, with a masterclass and tasting to follow.
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