João Portugal Ramos

João Ramos is one of Portugal's superstar winemakers. He's also an eloquent ambassador for the wines of Portugal, and I caught up with him at a recent trade fair to taste through the range of wines he makes. These come from one of the regions spearheading the emergence of Portuguese wines in the world market, the Alentejo. It's a warm-climate region, and many of the new wines from here have a distinct 'new world' twist to them. In addition to his own wines, Ramos also consults for a number of other wineries. Highly fluent in English, he's an eloquent chap and was kind enough to spend more time than he needed to talking me through each of the wines. His focus is primarily on Portugal's indigenous grape varieties; and his goal is simply to improve quality year on year ('I'm not a philosopher, I'm a wine maker'). These are truly modern-styled wines, with striking, up-front fruit flavours – Description from mriskic