Nonconformist, disruptive, bold, daring, restless, captivating.
These are some of the adjectives that can define both António Maçanita, winemaker and consultant, and the wines he makes. António Maçanita started in the world of wines in 2000, in the Azores, but it was only in 2004, at the age of 23, that he made his first wine.
Where others see no future, António Maçanita sees a challenge. Take the example of our Branco de Tintas (blanc de noirs), the first bottled in Portugal, an Alentejo statement wine, developed in 2008 when the CVRA decided to allow the purchase of white grapes from outside the region. Another first of note, the Branco de Talha, in 2010, also the first of its kind in Portugal, in the recovery of a winemaking tradition created by the Romans and which has seen an exponential revival in this decade.
However, it is perhaps in the Azores that the revolution is most visible, Azores grapes are now the most sought-after in Portugal. It is in the Azores that António Maçanita is fighting to legalise the use of "vinhas de cheiro” - hybrid vines that have been part of the community, culture and religion of the Azorean people for 170 years. As António Maçanita describes them, with visible pride and enthusiasm, "beautiful vines, some more than 150 years old".
It was 2018 that António Maçanita won both the title of Winemaker of the Year by Revista dos Vinhos and the 2018 Singularity Award from Grandes Escolhas Magazine and Fitapreta Vinhos received the award for Best Producer of the Year 2020, also by Revista de Vinhos. But the winemaker has been winning awards since his first wine: the 2004 Preta wine won the Alentejo Trophy at the International Wine Challenge.
Also in 2016, António Maçanita received the Winemaker Generation XXI 10 years 2006-2016 Trophy from Paixão do Vinho Magazine.
In the same year, Wine Magazine considered Azores Wine Company, Revelation Producer. In 2016, Azores Wine Company and its three partners won the Project of the Year and Entrepreneurs of the Year awards by the magazine 100 Maiores Empresas dos Açores, of the newspaper Açoriano Oriental - the oldest daily in Portugal.
Two years later, Revista de Vinhos chose Azores Wine Company's Vinha Centenária among the Best Wines of Portugal 2018. All wines signed by António Maçanita, whether from Alentejo, Douro or Azores, often win the recognition of the most prestigious national and international publications.
António Maçanita produces wines in four different regions, has created three own production projects, through his consulting company currently supports four producers, and launches more than 50 signature labels on the market annually.
To understand the winemaker António Maçanita, it is important to know his origins, his education, and his journey.
Born of Azorean father and Alentejo mother. Of their three children, two are linked to wine: winemakers António and Joana Maçanita. Both were born in Lisbon, "but I never felt I was from Lisbon", António confesses, while explaining that childhood holidays spent in the Azores stirred in him and his sisters a strong sense of belonging to the archipelago, which would eventually have an influence on their future.
It was in São Miguel that winemaker António Maçanita developed a strong connection to the sea and maritime activities, from bodyboarding to underwater hunting. This led him to confuse leisure with vocation and to consider a career in marine biology.
It was a friend of his father, a professor at the University of Algarve, who dissuaded him, advising him to rewrite his college application and go for Agronomy. This is where life’s twists of fate manifest: when correcting his application, António Maçanita made a mistake in the course code and ends up enrolling in Agro-Industrial Engineering.
His passion for viticulture, a subject which could be included in the course plan in the third year, is passed on to him by professor Rogério de Castro, one of the most respected viticulture scientists in Portugal and also a wine producer in the Vinhos Verdes region.
Winemaker António Maçanita's enthusiasm earned him an invitation to pursue an academic career at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA), but António intended to pursue different avenues. He first flew to the Azores, where he, in 2000 still during college, tried to plant a vineyard with two course mates.
These companions were Frederico Vilar Gomes, currently the winemaker at Companhia das Quintas, and João Palhinha, who for many years was responsible for Esporão's exports to Brazil and is now Esporão's Sales Manager in Brazil. They were only 20 years old when, after planting the first vineyard of their lives, a storm wiped out the land.
"I realised that a greater force was telling me: 'come back when you are ready'.
Winemaker António Maçanita would only return ten years later.
In just four years, António Maçanita has interned in California, USA, Australia and Bordeaux, France. Napa Valley was his first bet. Future winemaker António Maçanita was still in college when he spent four months at Merryvale Vineyards under the Cultural Agriculture Exchange Program. "When I arrived in Napa, I realized that theory was of little use to me and that I knew absolutely nothing." Back in college, and despite his rugby status allowing him this kind of flexibility, António Maçanita was not well received by his teachers.
António Maçanita, now a winemaker and producer, has always had disagreements with authority, but above all he was impatient with the status quo.
Memorizing material and restricting his studies only to the information that would come out in the exams was never part of his profile, a rebellious attitude that his teachers rarely understood. In 2002, however, he returned to California with the intention of working directly with Charles Thomas at the Rudd Estate winery - winemaker at Mondavi and Opus One for 15 years, two of the wineries that revolutionized Napa Valley wines. Learning from Charles Thomas was constant.
Winemaker António Maçanita would ask a question and the answer would always come in the form of an essay. It was at this point, and based on the process of the winery where he stayed in the second round of California, that winemaker António Maçanita began to develop a work that ended up defining his current way of making wine: the process of using pumps versus gravity.
In short: the choice is between a more efficient and faster production method, i.e. pumping over the must, which can cause bruising or tearing of very fragile skins, releasing uninteresting aromas or structural compounds; or directing the crushed grapes to the fermentation vat via a lifting conveyor, i.e. gravity.
Winemaker António Maçanita's choice is gravity and this is the method he chooses in his wineries.
This defines my way of making wine. Is it anti-investment? Yes, but this way I can better control what I'm doing. I make slow wine.
After handing in his final course work and graduating from university, winemaker António Maçanita headed to Australia, where he worked for five months at the d'Arenberg winery, which has been considered one of Australia's most successful wineries several times and where its owner, Chester Osborn, already in the fourth generation of the family, has been declared personality of the year many times.
Here, once again, the method adopted went against everything António had learned. Even so, within three weeks he was in charge of the night shift in the pressing department.
It was through a winemaker he met in Australia, Jack Walton, that António managed to get his next experience in Bordeaux, France. With rugby status, he ended up getting an apprenticeship at Château Lynch-Bages in 2003. Before that, however, winemaker António Maçanita and two friends sent their CVs to Herdade da Malhadinha. When only Frederico Vilar Gomes was called, António and the third friend infiltrated the trip and ended up getting the job three times over.
The first stone of interaction with the Portuguese wine-growing industry was laid.
These four years of traveling had a big impact on winemaker António Maçanita's modus operandis. Not only, of course, in the accumulation of experience and learning, but also in the working structure of his own wineries.
He brought from the USA and Australia a horizontal way of assigning responsibility to workers, but from France, where positions are more hierarchical and hermetic, he brought the essential conviviality at the harvest table, with good food and good wines.
António Maçanita's wines are produced in different regions, but with a very firm common thread: historical recovery and appreciation of the inherent characteristics of the grape varieties and regions, not following fashions, but creating them, sometimes unintentionally. In António Maçanita's wines and in his production, his dedication to the terroir and to sustainable local development is clear.
Winemaker António Maçanita says that for him, terroir is defined by its contradictory definition.
That is
a wine that incorporates the Terroir of a region is a wine that couldn't have been made anywhere else but where it was, because it incorporates so much of what is unique to that place: climate, exposure, soil, unique grape varieties and the traditional way of making wine. For someone to try to copy it elsewhere, they would have to import those same grape varieties, plant them in a similar place and produce them using the same traditional technique
Much of the success of António Maçanita's wines comes from the winemaker's constant dissatisfaction in wanting to delve deeper into each region and find what makes it unique. In each wine he shares this exercise of trial, testing and recovery.
António Maçanita's wines often call into question the "collective memory" of the region, as they go further back in time, using techniques and grape varieties that only exist in old books. All this at the service of finding the "Holy Grail" of each region's terroir, the winemaker produces the wines that give him pleasure, great wines, unique and full of personality, as if it were a journey through the past and present.
Of course, there are regions with a "stronger" Terroir than others and it is this difference that makes a place unique.
For example: "a Terrantez from Pico in the Azores, planted in a crack in the volcanic rock, where nothing else would grow, less than 50 meters from the wild Atlantic Ocean, with a grape variety that only exists in the Azores, constantly receiving the sea's rays, has a specificity of flavor that we could only copy by planting it in the same place, with the same grape variety, that's Terroir."
António Maçanita's wines have focused on various indigenous grape varieties that have almost disappeared over time, due to lack of productivity, color, alcohol, being too much work or simply being out of fashion.
In the Azores, one of António Maçanita's wines is produced 100% with the Terrantez do Pico variety, a variety recovered in 2010 by winemaker António Maçanita in collaboration with the Agricultural Development Services of São Miguel Island, which is undoubtedly a milestone on this path of recovering indigenous grape varieties. Still in the Azores, António Maçanita set out on a project researching the genetics of Azores grape varieties in collaboration with Biocant, resulting in a scientific article published in 2018 in the Autralian Journal of Grape and Wine Research;
In the Algarve, the success of the trial of the Negra Molle variety, by António Maçanita and Cláudia Favinha, returns this variety to the Portuguese tables, making it part of António Maçanita 's portfolio of wines. This essay resulted from a consulting project for the producer João Clara, in 2011. Negra Molle is perhaps Portugal's oldest grape variety, and is the Algarve region's greatest wine-growing heritage.
In regions like Alentejo and Douro, where the climate and soils have great similarities with other regions, the role of grape varieties becomes even more fundamental as a symbol of the region's identity and its DNA. For they hold both the millennia of displacement of populations and the various spontaneous crossings over time, which gave rise to new varieties, some rejected by Man and others chosen that have reached the present day.
In the Alentejo, it can be said that the process of understanding the region's native grape varieties began in 2007, which is reflected in António Maçanita's wines, starting with the Fitapreta Red wine, which uses only the Aragonez, Trincadeira and Alicante Bouschet grape varieties. This is followed in 2008 by the Fitapreta White which focuses on old vine white blends, in 2010 the Tinto de Castelão and in 2015 the A Trincadeira (Não É Tão) Preta.
However, in 2018 António Maçanita's wines had a major addition, the "Chão dos Eremitas vineyard". This is the first vineyard that António Maçanita bought in the Alentejo, a 50-year-old vineyard with almost extinct grape varieties that once dominated the Alentejo, such as: Tinta Carvalha, Moreto, Alicante Branco, Tamarez or Trincadeira das Pratas and that will surely mark the future of António Maçanita wines.
In the Douro, the wines of António Maçanita produced with his sister Joana Maçanita, seek to explore and understand the potential of the various Douro climates, with the Touriga Nacional tested in various terroirs (Letra A, Cima Corgo, Douro Superior), and to understand the Douro pre-Touriganisation that can be found in the small remaining old plots, some of which are over 100 years old, and which result in the Olgas and the Canivéis wines.
All of António Maçanita's wine projects are born from challenges, from partnerships driven by friendship and the complicity of those who share the same vision and passion for wine.
António Maçanita, with the care of an alchemist and a taste for challenges, allied to the irreverence that characterises him and the will to innovate, generates new projects that quickly become a great success.
António Maçanita Chronology