But no… wine, it seems, is also in crisis. The EU is paying farmers to pull up vines to tackle the glut of an ever-rising European wine lake, which, like our barragem (dam), has filled to bursting since the last harvest.
Hopefully over here in the ‘Off-Grid and Entertaining’ column, we see the sunny side… as we also do with the continuing deluge of rain.
The tanks might be full and the lake overflowing, but think of the benefit to the groundwater. This is a wonderful investment in our borehole longevity, despite the muddy dogs and puddled road.
Equally with wine, we are planting half a hectare of vines … because they look nice, we want to learn how to make wine, and presumably when the European wine lake has evaporated in a few years, we’ll still be able to drink our stuff.
I have been called Pollyanna in the past and I resemble that comment, even when every cloud is lined with a lot of rainfall.
That said, there is a lot of wining going on about how little people are drinking – from the abstemious yoof to the big changes in society reflected by this reduction in wine demand.
Let’s face it – there’s so much wine here in Portugal, they were washing the streets with 2.2 million litres of it two years ago… or so it appeared.
I particularly liked the UK Guardian’s headline, “Portuguese town flooded by river of ‘good quality’ red wine”, although I’m not convinced by their inverted commas – the idea that it would be anything else? (and does that make it any more tragic?)
The last time the European wine tanks were full to overflowing, it was the 1980s – the decade of excess – they had to rush to distil it into industrial quantities of industrial brandy… and that way madness lies.
Brandy definitely counts as breaking the dry January thing, whereas the occasional grape juice isn’t going to harm, is it?
Amid all the noise of the readjusting world order: the rise of the right, the folly of fascism, the forgotten lessons of history and the whims of a deeply flawed robber baron king, there’s a lot in the inbox or the social feed to digest every day.
Thankfully, in the middle of all the madness, something interesting occasionally pops up, and this month it was a nicely written piece in The Economist entitled “Falling wine sales reflect a lonelier and more atomised world.”
It’s testament to our times that a headline like that strikes the recovering news addict as upbeat and interesting.
But the reason for the optimism is that we think – as dedicated wino-neers – that we have an antidote to oil the wheels of social interaction.
It very much falls in line with what we’re trying to do: bringing interesting people together with a glass of wine, sharing a meal and a story.
And by pulling quotes from the unnamed author of The Economist piece, I’ll explain why.
“The long, dark days can lower people’s moods”
Duh. On the one hand, it’s a great idea giving up booze for January, but on the other, it’s a terrible time to deny yourself something nice to warm up the longer nights, especially when the act of drinking takes you to a nice cosy bar.
But straight off the back of the festive season with bulging belt buckles it seems like the right thing to do (“the exhortations of do-gooders to forgo…” as the writer elegantly puts it!)
Ana and I cut back, but more in the realisation that running a tourism lodge around wine and joining in with every guest is going to kill us pretty quickly.
I’ve never suffered from the SAD (seasonal affective disorder), but that’s mostly because I’ve organised my life around living in places where it’s still warm and sunny most of the time.
“Wine’s decline reflects something deeper: a fraying of the social fabric that once held Western societies together.”
That’s what Andrés Pérez thinks. His family runs the Alyan vineyard in Chile (which looks amazing by the way), where “Wine tasting is more a carefully curated social event than a lesson in tannins.”
I said exactly the same thing presenting the recent wine story-tasting for 43 people. Well, perhaps not quite as eloquently or directly, but it’s what I meant – it’s less about fancy language and more about enjoying what you like.
Yes, you read it correctly, wine tasting… for 43… that was a first!
We had a corporate retreat, or ‘off-site’ as we’ve learned is the new word for it and, despite the rain, our solar system once again brilliantly navigated a full house.
Alyan winery in Chile apparently “once offered hour-long tasting sessions. Now they last four. By the end of the visit, strangers are swapping numbers and shaking hands.” Shaking hands? After four hours? Wow. They know how to live.
While I didn’t bang on about Alentejo wines for four hours, the volume of conversation certainly went up as the wine went down.
“Anthropologists see the decline in communal eating as part of a broader social unravelling.”
We’ve loved hosting a family-style meal around a long table on the terrace when we’ve had the time in this first year of being open.
(Running this place is sometimes a bit like the Trump presidency… it feels like a lot longer than a year!)
It’s been great to bring people together over a fish braai or some grilled black pork with lashings of Alentejo wine – ideally from a flagon – to get the conversations going.
“People across the rich world increasingly live, and eat, alone. As a result, more people now eat and unwind in front of screens.”
Now that’s an easy one. We give our guests the option of letting their phones have a holiday too: to switch off and take it easy, ideally from the comfort of a locked box (the phones, not the guests).
An old BBC cameraman friend from Nairobi always swore he needed to go on a safari at least once every six weeks for the eye muscles workout.
After all the close-up reading we do in front of screens, he argued, we periodically need to scan a distant horizon to maintain the flexibility to switch to long vision.
It’s also good to maintain the ability to know the difference between a lion and a rock that looks like a lion at 400m.
“Generation Z… drink differently, increasingly seeking out quality and novelty.”
Tick. Of the 350 different grapes grown in Portugal, 250 are indigenous. And nothing says wine novelty more than Antão Vaz and Arinto, Trincadeira, Tinta Miúda and the two Touriga’s (Nacional and Franca).
Quality and novelty are a draw with young drinkers on the basis that the reason the hipster burnt their mouth on coffee was because they wanted to drink it before it was cool (buh-buhm-tshing).
Alentejo is, of course, home to the original natural wine talha, or amphora wine, made the way the Romans made it – and made that way in a few places ever since.
And it’s perhaps the main reason our lower, or Baixo Alentejo, has been awarded European City of Wine for 2026.
“For some people, drinking is an isolating addiction. But for most, it is a social indulgence. And that, increasingly, is what people are missing.”
I’ve always loved a bit of social indulging. I have been known to socially overindulge, but only occasionally.
And that’s the inspiration around our first venture into the world of Wine Retreats we’re doing with the Hutchins Wine Academy in May.
Join a dedicated gang of wino-neers to lift your mood, repair the fraying social fabric, communally consume, pop the phone in a box, and join GenZ by seeking out some quality and novelty. And, above all, to socially indulge.
More than 50 wines, some amazing meals and vineyard adventures, and you’ll leave it tasting like a sommelier (whatever they taste like)!
Read Alastair Leithead’s last article: Off-grid and entertaining in Portugal – Marketing 101: Blessed be the cheesemaker … and her name is Lídia
