Quinta Vale D. Maria CV Curriculum Vitae 2019 (Van Zellers)

Cellar for up to 11 years. No need to decant before serving. Cristiano van Zeller purchased the Quinta Vale D. Maria in 1996 after heading up his family’s prestigious Quinta do Noval for many years. Amongst the estate’s gems are 10 hectares of fifty and sixty year old vines which Cristiano and his team have worked to restore as well as planting indigenous varieties on other plots on the estate. Cristiano and his fellow winemaker Sandra Tavares da Silva named this wine after the feeling that this exquisite wine was worthy of being listed on their CVs as a benchmark bottling from the Douro region. The grapes are sourced from the estate’s prime vineyards on the river Torto which are planted with vines more than 80 years old. Following the harvest the grapes are trodden aby foot in large stone lagars as is traditional in the region before being vinified. The wine is then aged in oak barrels for 21 months before bottling. One of the most sought-after wines from Portugal, the Curriculum Vitae opens with seductive aromas of dark cherries and plums along with sweet baking spice from the oak ageing. On the palate there is a full body, firm tannins and wonderfully concentrated wild berry and cherry jam flavours which linger long on the tongue.