Meet the Baga Grape

Wine With a View is a big fan of the Baga grape. It is the prime red grape variety in Bairrada and its typical aromas range from forest fruits, plums to coffee and lead to a dark color. Baga matures easily with good sun exposure and produces dark wines with concentrated aromas that ages very well in the bottle.

At our Wine With a View trucks and also online, we feature the Aliança Sparkling Bruto and Rosé, which are some of the best examples of a sparkling Baga wine.

The Aliança caves were founded in 1927 and bought by the Bacalhoa vineyard in 2007. Francisco Antunes is the prize-winning enologist from the Aliança Caves, where our unique sparkling wine is produced. The Aliança bruto is exclusively made out of the Baga grape, the most traditional grape from the Bairrada region. It is fruity, complex and persistent, with a balanced acidity.  

The Aliança Rosé is, too, an exclusively Baga production. This salmon-colored sparkling wine is fruity, light and fresh with a taste of strawberry and gooseberry.

 

 

The Bairrada region is an exceptional terroir with a great variety of indigenous grapes, making Bairrada wines, with their strong personality and unaffected flavor, unique in the world. Initially, Bairrada was known for its red wines, but over the past century, white wines and especially sparkling wines, in which Bairrada was pioneer in Portugal, have become very important.

What do Wine With a View, Luís Pato, Filipa Pato, Quinta das Bágeiras, Sidónio de Sousa, Quinta da Vacariça, Nierpoort and Palace Hotel of Buçaco have in common? Their love for the Baga grape. Altough very unique in their own way, the Baga Friends are united by the same passion: their admiration for the Baga grape, a red Portuguese wine grape variety planted in the Bairrada DOC.

The Baga friends represent this unique grape and are vertiginous creators of wines, always looking for new enological journeys, new interpretations of the grape varieties and the Bairrada’s soils.

What is remarkable about this group is their heterogeneity, despite using the same type of grape from the same region. A Baga based wine made by Dirk Niepoort, open in color, elegant and light has nothing to do with a Baga produced by François Chasans from Quinta da Vacariça, which is almost impenetrable when young, extremely dark and tannic. The reds from Bussaco are very different as well, also because they are made with grapes from both the Bairrada and the Dão region. The ones from Bágeiras are classical and personal and the ones from Sidónio de Sousa focus on a pungent acidity.

Summing up, the Baga Friends are a perfect example of a group that completes each other and reflects Bairrada region’s immense potential. Through their wines one can get an idea of what is and what can be the Bairrada region; that it is possible to be modern and classical at the same time and that there is not just one way to get the best out of a vineyard. It all depends on preference and work philosophy.