2018 Wine & Soul Manoella Red Blend, Douro, Portugal (750ml)   

About the Icons
A superb, deeply-flavored blend of traditional Douro varieties - Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, and Tinta Francisca. Wine & Soul is a project of Sandra Tavares da Silva and her husband Jorge Serôdio Borges.

\As they tell the story, "We started making a garage wine we called ‘Pintas’ (spots), a single vineyard red wine that derives from a very old vineyard, a traditional Douro old vineyard mixed planting that holds over thirty varieties together. We wanted to make a full bodied wine, a wild and vertiginous wine that would parade and illustrate the flair and colossal landscape of the Douro Valley. Pintas just shows the best version of the Douro, that voluptuous fruit of the Douro, the raciness, the enthusiasm and the perfect balance of the long and lasting finish. Later we came up with the remaining wines of our portfolio, the red Pintas Character, an easier more fruit driven version of Pintas, the white Guru, a single vineyard white we source from the high altitude vineyards, Vintage Port Pintas and our very special 5G Port Wine, a very, very old Tawny Port that comes as a blend of several very old Port wines, most of them over a hundred years old Ports. In 2009 we inherited Quinta da Manuella, a fabulous estate planted mainly with very old vineyards, south oriented, some of them over an hundred years old. Some blocks younger, over thirty years old and did start new plantings since we received this estate in 2009. Our very first wine from our ‘youngest’ property, Quinta da Manoella Vinhas Velhas, quickly became one of the best and most remarkable wines in the Douro."