António Marques da Cruz & Tiago Teles
Serra de Montejunto (Lisboa)

COZs is a partnership between two grape growers who have been leaders of the vanguard of new-wave Portuguese wines, Tiago Teles (also brought into Australia by Tasty Things) and Antonio de Marques da Cruz of Quinta da Serradinha (who will be following in future years).

Having been good mates for many years, they started working together started in 2015. After the untimely death of Jose Mendonça, they approached the family to ask if they would allow them to work their vineyard in Figueira da Foz, a village just north of Lisbon. This place was the primary source of the grapes of Quinta dos Cozinheiros, the producer of a wine that became a reference point for the new generation of winemakers in Portugal, and which unfortunately came to an end with the tragic and untimely death of Mendonça.

Invigorated by working together and the new challenge, they set about finding similar vineyards from traditional but unheralded wine-growing regions that would allow them to make pure expressive wines with freshness and energy, as they do with their own vineyards and the Figueira da Foz vineyard.

They fell in love with the Serra de Montejunto, a Jurrasic period limestone mountain range about an hour north of Lisbon, scattered with ancient bush-trained vineyards. It is a protected national park that houses incredible biodiversity including thousands and thousands of bats!

They started with a two-hectare vineyard of the indigenous white variety Vital. They now work six vineyards in Serra de Montejunto, all planted to Vital, all 35-50-year-old bush vines that have only been massale selected. They also have vineyards of Castelão at the base of the mountain, at Quinta do Olival da Murta, where vinification takes place.

In the steep uneven vineyards (that Antonio and Tiago seem able to scale like mountain goats) their vineyard management is fastidious in the extreme. They replant via massale selection to preserve genetic diversity (of around 70 distinct clones), undertake vigorous rejuvenating winter pruning working as closely as possible to the roots (which in bush vines means 10-20cm off the ground) and practice zero till organic regenerative farming, all carried out by hand. This is in sharp contrast to the almost universal application of monoclonal plantings and conventional farming methods in the surrounding vineyards (and indeed, most of Portugal).

The vineyards being at 250-300m altitude, with well-draining limestone soils with steep exposure and varying aspects, as well as the bracing breezes from the Atlantic Ocean a mere 30km away, allow for wines of extreme freshness without sacrificing ripeness and complexity.

In the cellar Tiago and Antonio do as little as possible, with no additions or subtractions except for small amounts of sulphur at bottling (20-30ppm), allowing the wines to express the terroir they instantly fell in love with back in 2017. Fermentation is done in stainless and elevage is always in old oak of various formats or concrete. Whites often undergo a short pre-fermentation maceration and red maceration times are kept short, to focus on the aromatic potential and freshness possible from these sites, rather than the structural potential.

I will leave Tiago to the concluding words:

“Starting from the acceptance of nature, the goal of COZs is to make geographical wines that express their origin and age with dignity. We don’t want to make French, or Italian wines, nor are we interested in making wines which are en vogue in other parts. Portugal is a beautiful country, but it is not perfect. I think that showing who we are is a nice way of doing things.”