After 15 years of working alongside some of Portugal’s most important mainstream winemakers, André Duque Lourenço grew tired of making ‘coca-cola wines’, and embraced a less complicated and more natural approach to winemaking, and in 2021 he founded the Gardunha Sul project.
The project is based Beira Baixa, a lesser-known wine region on the Spanish border, roughly halfway down Portugal, with Fundão the nearest urban landmark. The valley of the Gardunha mountain has a range of soils, including volcanic, granitic and a mixture of schist and clay.
There’s also a range of microclimates, with riper fruit coming from the plains of the south and more acidic fruit from the mountains in the north. André farms 2.5 hectares himself, and works with four other small scale traditional local growers at different points in the valley. Blending the fruit together allows him to make wines that are delicate but powerful.
The project has 3 main goals:
1) Environmental: To have sustainable vineyards, with organic and biodynamic principals, with minimal intervention and treatments
2) Cultural: Researching and preserving old grape varieties – André doesn’t want quantity (he makes only 12,000 bottles of wine a year) but typicity.
Portugal has a vast wealth of little known indigenous grape varieties, but sadly many of these are being uprooted and replaced with Chardonnay, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon etc
3) Social: André pays his growers up to four times the market kilogram price, to encourage them to keep their old vines and lower-yielding varieties in the ground.
This guaranteed income also encourages traditional farmers and their descendants to stay in the region and maintain the rural economy, at a time when many Portuguese are abandoning the country for the lure of the city.
