Adelaide Red 2016 is a wine that comes from a very old vineyard, from which no more than 400 grams of fruit are extracted per plant. A century-old vineyard, grown on a ravine of difficult access on a tributary of the Douro, with a wide variety of grape varieties, as it used to be planted. The result is a wine as rare, as unique and as sublime as Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira was.
And then there is the decision ritual.
As a tribute to the great-great-grandmother of the Quinta’s current managers, João Ferreira Alvares Ribeiro, Francisco Ferreira and Francisco Olazabal, the wine is only launched if, unanimously, the three great-great grandchildren are in agreement. The criterion is simple. Do you have enough concentration? Is it complex, fresh, with silky tannins? Will it live long, decades? Will it be a Grand Vin? If everyone is in agreement, there is Adelaide. But all it takes is one dissension, one disagreement, one pout, for the wine to have another destination: the cellar, where it will wait for time to bring it the desired complexity — a complexity far from the fashions of the present — or another, less noble, baptism .
This is the protocol.