Tiago Teles arrived at winemaking by an unusually thoughtful route. He trained as a telecommunications engineer, spent years working in that field while tasting obsessively across Portugal, then turned to wine writing and eventually published a manifesto on natural wine and terroir. In 2012, he and his father planted a two-hectare plot in Bairrada, the region his family is from, and the first bottles followed from there. He has not looked back.
The Regions
Tiago now works across three Portuguese appellations. In Bairrada, on clay-limestone and sandy soils, he produces his Gilda and Maria da Graca reds, built on Alfrocheiro, Castelao, and Tinta Barroca. In Lisboa, he collaborates on the COZ project with winemaker Antonio Marques da Cruz. In the Minho, at Arcos de Valdevez close to the Galician border, he produces Raiz from native Loureiro grapes, a macerated white of unusual tension and minerality.
How He Works
Grapes are foot-trodden in a small 600-litre stainless steel lagar and fermented with wild yeasts. No enzymes, no acidification, no filtration, no fining, and no sulfur additions. The wines are aged in used oak or cement tanks before bottling. Tiago applies the same editorial discipline he once brought to wine writing: every decision is intentional, nothing is there by default.
The Philosophy
He has written that varieties are not the point: they serve the wine, not the other way around. The result is a portfolio grounded in specific Portuguese soils, honest to their origins, and built to reward the kind of careful attention Tiago himself spent years learning to give.
