Natural Wine Producers: Working With Nature

Pedro Coelho founded Pormenor in 2013 to make fresh, elegant Douro wines from 50-to-100-year-old vines at high altitude, using organic farming and native yeasts to chase freshness where the valley once only sought power.

Born in Porto in 1983, Márcio Lopes scours the Vinho Verde and Douro for old abandoned vineyards, then makes wines of fierce purity from them — native yeasts, minimal sulfur, and an impatience with the ordinary.

At Quinta do Paco near Obidos, former civil engineer Rodrigo Filipe farms organically and makes the Humus wines naturally, with no added sulfites, unfiltered and unfined.

Manuel Taxa and Elisabete Raposo farm the granite terraces of Braga with organic and biodynamic methods, producing sulfite-free Alvarinho and Avesso from one of the Vinho Verde region's most committed small estates.

A former telecoms engineer turned vigneron crafting low-intervention Vinho Verde from his family's century-old Azal and Arinto vines under the Sem Igual label.

Fifth-generation farmer António Marques da Cruz tends 7 organic hectares near Leiria on Portugal's limestone Serra d'Aire, carrying forward a winemaking lineage that earned the country's first organic viticulture certification in 1994.

Former wine writer and telecom engineer Tiago Teles makes low-intervention wines from Bairrada, Lisboa, and Vinho Verde, foot-trodding grapes in a small cement lagar and adding no sulfur.

Maria Pato, youngest of Bairrada's famous Pato wine family, hides behind a duck mask and surreal labels to make irreverent, indigenous, low-intervention wines.

On the banks of the Tamega, a grower coaxes the rare red-fleshed Tinta Nacional into a long-aged, lightly fizzy red unlike anything else in Vinho Verde.

Ground chestnut flowers stand in for sulfur in these granite-grown Vinho Verde wines, fermented in century-old amphorae the old monastic way.

From a high plateau above the Douro, Tiago Sampaio coaxes vivid, low-sulfur natural wines and pet-nats out of century-old field blends under the Uivo label.

Retired history teacher Fernando Paiva tends just three biodynamic hectares in the Sousa Valley, making some of Portugal's most singular Vinho Verde using a signature technique of dried chestnut flowers in place of sulfur.