Oxalá, and its sister winery Quinta da Confeiteira are located near the ancient Roman city of Évora in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. This small and specialized winery’s mission is to rejuvenate the integrity and millennia-old wine-making practices in this region and to create wines of purity, elegance, and style that express the unique terroir of the place from which they come. The estate itself consists of 5 hectares (12 acres) around the winery that are planted with five varieties of red grapes that are traditionally grown in this region of the Alentejo and a small vineyard plot closer to the important Medieval city of Estremoz from which the winery harvests its white grapes. As is typical for this region of Portugal, the wines that are produced by Oxalá are field blends, relying on the different nuanced characteristics of the different grapes that grow in the vineyards to create a balanced and complex wine. In the case of the white field blends, the head winemaker, Hugo Campos, vinifies wines based on the type of soil in which the grapes are growing, using it as a opportunity to emphasize the significant diversity of terroir that the region offers and illustrating the complex differences that can emerge when the same grapes are grown in, for example, calcareous limestone soils as compared to granitic or quartzite-rich soil. This meticulous attention to detail and intimate familiarity with the estate, from which all of the grapes that are used in the production of Oxalá’s wines come, exemplifies the approach that Campos employs in his winemaking process - to exercise minimal intervention and as light of a hand as possible in order to let the grapes, the land, and the wine speak for themselves.
The particular region of the Alentejo in which Oxalá is located enjoys thousands of years of winemaking history, as illustrated by the aqueducts and Roman ruins that dot the landscape surrounding the vineyards. These ancient traditions are reflected in the practices and production methods that are employed in the winery, including open native yeast fermentation and the significant use of amphorae, enormous earthenware jars frequently employed by ancient Mediterranean civilizations for the production of wine. This reverence for both the land itself and the viticultural traditions of his region which have defined the characteristics of its wine for millennia illustrate the main motivations which led Campos to found this winery in the first place. After many years of working as a winemaker for other prominent Alentejo wineries that were primarily concerned with producing large volumes of commercially-oriented wines, Hugo made the decision that he wanted to start his own small project with an ethos that was diametrically opposed to that of the large industrial wineries for which he had previously been employed. From this desire Oxalá was founded, and the impact of his philosophy can be clearly felt in the small quantities of exceptional wines that he now produces.
Oxalá is a small boutique winery that is driven by a passion for the land which it occupies and the thousands of years of tradition that have informed the characteristics of the wines that are grown and made there. It is a winery that is truly concerned with allowing the wines that it produces to speak for themselves and express the sweeping beauty of the terroir which they represent.
