05/26/2026
🥂Meet the bottle 🥂
Alvarinho — Contacto (2023)
This wine comes from Monção e Melgaço, the northernmost corner of Vinho Verde, on the Portuguese bank of the Minho River directly across from Spain's Rías Baixas. Granite bedrock, granite-sand topsoil, a mountain-sheltered basin that gets more sunshine than the rest of the DOC. It is the only sub-region permitted to bottle 100% Alvarinho.
At a glance:
Grape: Alvarinho
Style: Just Dry
Body: Light
Color: Pale straw with glints of green and silver
Nose: Lemon, lime, white peach, jasmine, a trace of wet stone.
Palate: Dry, medium-bodied, creamier than you'd expect from an unoaked wine, with cutting acidity and a saline edge.
Finish: Long and mineral, with a faint textural grip from brief skin contact.
✨ Cold Hyacinths
A white that feels floral and cool at once: aromatic, textured, and just barely softer than bone dry. ✨
The Producer:
Anselmo Mendes is called "Senhor Alvarinho" in Portugal. He trained in France, came home in 1998, and almost single-handedly rewrote the rules for Alvarinho — still, bone dry, mineral, serious. "Contacto" is his entry-level bottling; the name refers to brief skin contact — a technique he pioneered on Alvarinho when everyone else said it wouldn't work.
✨ A spring afternoon and a clean palate. Like walking through flowers in a cold breeze. ✨
