8 May 2024

Diogo Lopes, one of the new generation's leading oenologists in Portugal, awarded the prize Oenologist of the Year 2022 by magazine Vinho Grandes Escolhas, was the name chosen to reinforce the oenology team at Quinta dos Frades. The Lisbon-born, 45-year-old oenologist, who has been successfully consulting in a number of Portuguese regions, is now reunited with his mentor, Anselmo Mendes, at the emblematic estate of Folgosa do Douro. With this new arrival, the owning family of Quinta dos Frades ensures continuity to their own-brand project started in 2008, the year when the first DOC Douro wines were bottled. The project now steps into a new stage, meant to further valorise the property's history and the extraordinary heritage of its old vineyards.

“We started to bottle our first wines in 2008 and we are now taking a brand-new step towards maximising the unique qualities of the property, which includes one of the main patches of old vineyard in the Douro region, particularly 20 acres of over one hundred-year-old vineyard. Besides Quinta dos Frades, we also own Quinta do Castelo, in Santa Marta de Penaguião, where we produce our white wines. The arrival of Diogo Lopes, together with his special connection to Anselmo Mendes, will enable us to take this new step, while ensuring the response that both our history and our vineyard deserve”, says Aquiles Ferreira de Brito, Delfim Ferreira's great-grandson and the company's director.

Diogo Lopes graduated in Agronomy Engineering from the Instituto Superior de Agronomia of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, post-graduated in Oenology, and completed traineeships in several Portuguese regions, as well as in Napa Valley, California. Diogo Lopes is a project consultant in Alentejo, Lisbon, Vinhos Verdes, the Azores and the Douro. Now, at Quinta dos Frades, he intends to further explore his vocation as an experimentalist and to study the grape varieties and the plots, in search of the purest expressions of terroir. “This is a very rich property which is itself part of the history of the Douro, with a very extensive area of old vineyard, at different altitudes and exposures, including the region's iconic varieties. The wines by Quinta dos Frades are very high quality and it will be extremely interesting to identify and confirm the potential of specific plots. This is ultimately what makes the identity, the depth and the differentiation every project aspires to”, says Diogo Lopes.

Approximately 200 acres in area, Quinta dos Frades is one of the oldest estates in the Douro. In the 13th century, it was donated to friars belonging to the Cistercian Order, widely established in the Douro at the time. It was then integrated in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Salzedas and it has ever since been linked with the vineyard and the wine. After the religious orders were extinguished, Quinta dos Frades was auctioned off in 1841 by the first Baron of Folgosa. In 1941 it was acquired by the Portuguese industrialist Delfim Ferreira and has remained in the family to this day.