Rita Ferreira & Vítor Claro
Portalegre (Alentejo)

What has become Dominó started as a tiny side project for acclaimed chef Vítor Claro back in 2010. Whilst running the wistfully revered, eponymous ‘Claro’ in downtown Lisbon he was invited by a winemaker to help with a harvest and make some wine (some bloke by the name of Dirk Nieeport, you may have heard of him).

Bitten by the life of a vigneron he searched for his own fruit the next year. Scouring southern Portugal for the right opportunity, he came across a tiny parcel of super old traditional mixed-planted bush vines in the upper reaches of Portalegre, the jutting mountainous outlier in far east Alentejo. The first year he managed to make one barrel of white, one barrel of red, and Dominó was born.

Vitor continued balancing the restaurant and winemaking for a few more years, each vintage working more and more in the vineyards until it hit him. In his heart, the restaurant was the side project and nurturing vines from winter pruning to bottle was his calling. Luckily by this point, his wife Rita (who was a high-flying architect in Lisbon) was impressed enough by the wines he was managing to make that they both decided to commit themselves to making Dominó their lives.

Driving from Lisbon to Portalegre through Alentejo, the juxtaposition of the two is put into sharp focus. Portalegre is technically a subregion of Alentejo but they might as well be different planets. After three hours of driving through the flat, scorched red plains of Alentejo, with only Iberian pigs, acorn trees and heavily irrigated wine farms for company, you suddenly hit an incline and all of a sudden you are at 600m altitude and surrounded by green again.

This specific micro-climate gives the wines the potential to have a level of freshness and drive that just isn’t possible in the rest of the Alentejo. Unfortunately, most producers eschew this potential and put out a plethora of over-ripe, over-extracted, critic-score-chasing wines trying to fit into the international idea of what Alentejo wine ‘should be’. Not Vitor and Rita. They routinely pick 2-3 weeks earlier than their neighbours and always have invigorating freshness, with terroir and vintage expression at the core of everything they do.

Farming is organic without certification and all done by hand. Rita and Vitor have practised zero tilling since the beginning and encourage a wild and diverse selection of cover crops for both their anti-fungal and soil regeneration qualities.

The vineyards of Portalegre are a mixture of schist, granite and clay, with altitudes varying between 300-750m up at all kinds of exposures. Vitor and Rita work with about 20 varieties they can name, and plenty more they can’t, in super traditional mixed planted bush-vine vineyards, some well over 100 years old.

There is an embarrassment of muscats planted. Red, White, Pink, Grey, and ‘Leona’, a unique local hybrid. White varieties include Arinto, Tamarez and Alicante Branco with Castelão, Aragonez(Tempranillo) and Trincadeira being just some of the black grapes they work with. 

As well as making some great textural but moreish herbal whites, they specialise in the traditional wine style of the region, ‘Palheto’. Traditionally in Portugal, vineyards were all co-planted whites and reds and a lot of wines were made into Palheto (also ‘Palhete’), a genuine field blend that is co-harvested, co-fermented and macerated on whole bunches. The principle is to have overripe whites and underripe reds to balance and end up with an insanely complex 11-12% alcohol wine with an alchemistic tesselation of white and red tannins providing a velvety fresh texture. A renaissance of this wine style using ancient bush vines is hands down one of the most exciting things happening in Portuguese wine, and there are no finer examples than the wines Dominó are putting out.

They also lease vineyards in Colares and Carcavelos, two old-school vine-growing regions just outside Lisbon. They make a mineral-laden rose from Carcavelos and a beautiful salty pale red from beachside Colares.

Unsurprisingly given Vitor’s past in kitchens, Dominó’s wines are certainly gastronomic, but with alluring energy and vibrancy. Winemaking is minimal intervention, with generally short macerations with stems and small amounts of sulphur (20-30ppm) used at bottling.