Lés-a-Lés Train Ride through Portugal!
Jorge Rosa Santos and Rui Lopes, two winemakers and friends, have created a project called Lés-a-Lés that is the culmination of over a decade of work throughout Portugal. With labels modeled after old train tickets, they produce a range of wines from different regions, which we are offering today a-la-carte or as a special 6 pack! This unique Lés-a-Lés package is a window into Portuguese wines from all over the country.
From Jorge and Rui:
"The Lés-a-lés project was born from the desire of winemakers to recover ancient grape varieties and wine styles that were almost extinct in Portugal. This dream of Jorge Rosa Santos and Rui Lopes has become a reality in a collection of exclusive and limited edition wines. Lés-a-lés is a Portuguese expression that means “from one end to the other,” as this brand represents more than ten years of travels across Portugal, in search of fascinating regions and forgotten grape varieties. From the "Medieval of Ourém” to the "Arinto de Pedra e Cal," passing through the “Avesso” and many others, each wine is a journey, each label a ticket to discover a forgotten heritage."
Jorge and Rui are winemakers with a taste for exploring, experiencing, and learning the ins and outs of wine in their home country. They each spent over 10 years traveling throughout Portugal as consulting winemakers working for small and large estates, harvesting grapes and helping to create wines in nearly every wine producing region of Portugal. After meeting several times along the way, and working together, they were inspired to create the Lés-a-Lés project, which would showcase their love for Portugal and for the unique expressions and grape varieties of the regions where they have worked. It's a lot of work and a lot of traveling, not to mention a harvest period that is nearly 3 months long, but they have dedicated themselves to the project, much to the chagrin of their families! Both are beyond passionate about this project and they each show it in different ways, through energized conversations about the vineyards to deep dives about minerality and acid. For the Lés-a-Lés project, they selected locations that stood out to them from their decades of traversing the country, and envisioned labels that would resemble old train tickets, with the idea that each label would be a symbol of the region they were highlighting. To Jorge and Rui, the labels are a way to bridge the gap between the caretakers who tend to the vines and the person who finally opens the bottle!
We're now almost halfway through our train ride and at this point are at the foothills of the Montejunto range. Here we have an Alenquer white to carry us to the final three wines of our journey. We must take a big sneaky jump (no one ever said we weren’t on high speed trains) back north just to remember where the journey began to “stop” for a Tavora Varosa from the banks of the River Tedo. It’s quite good that we are back in the north because it is the first “stop” of the trip where get to dive into a red, the Trás-os-Montes Vinhas Velhas from the northeastern most part of Portugal, landlocked now by many mountains and past the Marão range.
Technically our journey ends here, and the special 6 pack consists of these wines above. However, if you want to keep traveling, we can step away from the Lés-a-Lés wines (off the track!) with an Alentejo red from Jorge's homeland called "Implicit." It is from Glória which is a more northern part of Alentejo, just north of Evora. The journey has now come to an end but Jorge and Rui have now opened up the door for more and more people to learn about the diverse regions throughout Portugal. (We'll talk to them about adding an Algarve wine, since the deep south is not yet part of the Lés-a-Lés project!)
“This is the result of more than 10 years traveling through Portugal from far and wide. A wine project - which summarizes our travels, our ideas, the regions that we are passionate about and above all the people and places that have impacted us most. Each wine is a stopover. Each wine is a story. And the journey doesn't end here...” - Jorge Rosa Santos e Rui Lopes
A special thanks to our Summer intern, Elena Angerman, for her help with our email newsletter and technical notes!
