2020 Casa de Saima Tinto

Casa de Saima is a very old estate in Portugal’s Bairrada region, a couple hours north of Lisboa. Saima is really the story of Graça Maria da Silva Miranda. Graça’s husband produced a little bit of wine for consumption and minimal local sales, but he primarily sold his fruit to the co-op. When they split in the late 1980’s, Graça decided to bottle all of her own wine, making her one of the first women in Bairrada to do so. Sadly, Graça passed away in early 2022. Today, her son Diogo Silva and son-in-law Paulo Cêpa continue Graça’s work of honoring the ancient winemaking traditions. The most notable example of this is the treading of the hand-harvested fruit in stone lagares, where open-air fermentation with native yeasts occurs before the wine is transported to 100 year old casks for a year of aging. When we visited Graça in Portugal in 2020, she brought us for lunch to a local haunt where the menu began and ended with roasted pork.