Contra-Jogo 2024

By the end of the millenium, the 55-year-old Fernando Paiva has reached an important stage of his career as a secondary school teacher, and he began a new, important stage of his life of winemaker in the Minho region in his Quinta da Palmirinha, a piece of land owned by his own family close to the town of Lixa (nowadays he has another parcel in Amarante). His main goal, however, was not to make wine, but juice, the most natural kind of juice. As a member of a long tradition of farmers, the always irreverent and adventurous Paiva seriouly invested in biological knowledge, until he systematized his biodynamic notion of farming.

The biodynamic approach to farming was not, however, the end of Paiva’s progression, since the addition of sulfur to wines – something that is really difficult to avoid – did not please him at all. One day destiny intervened when he heard on a radio program a professor of the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB) saying that, because of its antioxidant benefits, she was experimenting with chestnut flower in cheese preservation.

That was a true “eureka” moment for Paiva, who immediately scheduled an appointment with the IBT, creating an agreement to study the usage of chestnut flower in wine. In 2015 he started his experiment, making wine separately with chestnut flower with sulfur. The final results met his expectations, and after 2018 all his production is made exclusively with chestnut flower. The traveler who arrives at Quinta da Palmirinha is immediately greeted by a chestnut tree located close to the door of the small cellar. Paiva’s solution to the incessant dilemma of his wines was, after all, so close to his cellar.