Casa de Sabicos has just released a new vintage of Avó Sabica.
With only 3800 numbered bottles, the Avó Sabica 2013 is the third vintage of this iconic wine to be released on the market, after 2004 and 2011.
Only produced in exceptional years, the Avó Sabica 2013 Red Wine is made from the Trincadeira, Aragonez, and Alicante Bouschet grapes.
It aged 14 months in French oak barrels and over three years in the bottle before being released to the market.
It is a complex, full-bodied, smooth Alentejo wine that maintains the same excellence profile as previous vintages.
Unique Terroir
Avó Sabica is produced exclusively from grapes from Vinha das Pedras, one of the family's vineyards, which has extraordinary conditions for producing excellent wine musts.
In addition to the poor granite soils with rocky outcrops, Vinha das Pedras has a 3-4 meter water table that conserves water and provides the vine with the water it needs to complete its entire vegetative cycle, especially ripening.
To plant it, dynamite was needed to remove the rocky outcrops. Some were used to drain a water line, and the rest were piled into two large mounds.
Three Years and Three Exceptional Harvests
The first Avó Sabica was produced in 2004. After constructing the new Casa de Sabicos winery and creating optimal winemaking conditions, the extraordinary quality of the musts from Vinha das Pedras was confirmed that year.
Once the fermentation of the 2004 musts was finished, the wine was put into aging in new French oak barrels, fine grain, and medium plus toast. Its evolution in barrels was monitored through physical-chemical and sensory analyses. After about a year after being stabilized, the wine was bottled for further aging in the bottle in a climatized chamber, maintaining the same evolution control procedure for about three years. The Avó Sabica 2004 was released in 2009 with a limited edition of numbered bottles.
The second vintage of Avó Sabica was in 2011. With the same evolution profile, it was released in 2016, with the 2013 vintage already aging.
The year 2013 was, without a doubt, the one that most closely followed 2004 in all its evolutionary steps. The aromatic characteristics, the body, and the smoothness were decisive because, six years later, there was no doubt that the Avó Sabica brand was attributable to this outstanding wine.
All procedures for the production and evolution control of Avó Sabica are maintained the same way as in 2004. Whenever the quality standards deviate from that year, the grapes are used to produce Casa de Sabicos Reserva.
Image: A Tribute to the Family Matriarch
Being an exceptional-quality Alentejo wine, the name Avó Sabica was given as a tribute to the producers' great-grandmother. The matriarch of the Sabicos, Avó Sabica, was a woman ahead of her time. Simple, practical, determined, and full of grit, a widow while still very young, it was with courage and determination that Avó Sabica ensured the management of a Farm and the education of her eight children in the Alentejo.
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The label, therefore, had to be simple and special. The watercolor painting, painted by Avó Sabica's great-granddaughter Graça, subtly reveals several figures, appealing to the mother and children, entwined in a chromatic whole that conveys the overall balance of the wine. It is simultaneously complex, rich, and elegant, where all components can be detected, but none stands out on its own.
The slanted lettering suggests the handwriting of the time as if it were a signature of Avó herself.
A unique wine for extraordinary moments!
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