Vale dos Ares Alvarinho – Keeping It Fresh

The smooth and luxurious Vale dos Ares Alvarinho from MQ Vinhos.

100% Alvarinho from Monção e Melgaço, Vinho Verde, Portugal. This is a dry wine.

This review is brought to you by Vinho Verde Wines.

The Vale dos Ares Alvarinho is available for around $10. Sample submitted for review.

From the bottle:

The aroma of passion fruit, pineapple and apricot, with a smooth and long lasting taste. Goes well with salads, seafood, grilled fish, white meats, Asian cuisine, or simply a good conversation. Best at between 8-10C. A wine which ages well.

13% Alcohol

We’ve explored a wide range of wines in our series on Vinho Verde but today we go back to one of our favorite single varietals from this area, Alvarinho. (You can read more about this variety here.) Today’s wine also gives us an opportunity to talk about one of the little known pieces of winemaking – the freshness of harvested grapes.

There are a lot of numbers that go into winemaking – residual sugar, brix, alcohol levels, ph, altitude, fermentation temperature to name just a few. One that you may not often hear about is the time it takes to get grapes from a vine to the winery. This is extremely important with white wines as you want to keep the grapes fresh and cool so that fermentation doesn’t start early. Well today’s wine takes that freshness to the extreme – grapes are hand harvested and transported to the winery in an average time of 5 minutes! Let’s see how that translates to the taste in the bottle.

The 2015 Vale dos Ares Alvarinho from MQ Vinhos begins with a pleasing aroma of grapefruit, guava and other tropical fruit along with a little peach and honeysuckle. Tasting the wine reveals lots of honey-soaked, rich and fresh tropical fruit flavors as well as citrus, peach and apricot. The wine alse features a smooth, mouth-filling and luxurious texture. A bit of minerality leads into the dry, tart and delicious finish.

Looking for more of our favorite Vinho Verde picks? Find them all right here.

Ready to buy the Vale dos Ares Alvarinho? Check your local retailers.