Lobo e Falcão Centenário Grande Reserva 2022

At his beautiful 18th-century estate, José Lobo makes some of our best-loved Portuguese reds. José Lobo de Vasconcelos’s estate has been in the family for 250 years. It boasts 125 hectares of beautiful vineyards in Portugal’s Tejo, but there's just one small vineyard that José preserves as it always has been – surrounded by equally old olive trees. That’s the way farmers used to plant their land a century back. And José wouldn’t dream of changing it, even though the authorities complain it's against the rules. The vines are a mix of varieties, a field blend, just like the old days, which accounts for the wine's gorgeous rich depth of flavour. The grapes are all handpicked and trodden by foot in the cellar's traditional old lagars (large stone troughs) to get maximum flavour, then aged in French oak. Open early and decant, or cellar.