“I’m a crazy guy, ah?” Luis Pato asks Kat and me.
He waits for us to nod, then continues: “I make a pink. There was an error. The bottles start to explode! I have to optimize my process!”
There is a mad twinkle in his eyes, a blissful grin that suggests that nothing better could possibly happen than for one of his science experiments to detonate in the cellar, spraying the walls with glass and pink Baga juice.
“I have to optimize my process” is Pato’s mantra.
Early harvest, hyper-oxidized rosé dessert Baga? “I have to optimize my process!”
Single-fermentation sparkling Baga from tank to bottle? “I have to optimize my process!”
Luis Pato is known as the Father of Baga, the man who introduced the world to the grape’s greatness as a still red wine.
It’s this I’m interested in trying first—before I drink any of Pato’s wacky projects, I want to taste the wine that put Baga on the map. Pato pours Kat and me a full glass each. It’s early in the day, but neither of us spits—spitting in front of the Father of Baga seems wrong, somehow, like taking a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa. Pato’s monovarietal Baga, released in 2010, comes from 40-year-old vines in Beiras, 20 kilometers from the ocean. “A Bordeaux-like climate,” Pato says, “similar, but better.”
The wine, which spends one year in used French oak casks, is maroon in color, with hints of amber around the edge. To me, it smells like black olives, though there’s also a hint of kumquat playing off some earthier forest floor tones. Luis Pato’s Baga is nuanced and balanced—good minerality, along with cured red meat notes, raspberries, and unripe cherries. This wine is light-medium bodied, with strong acidity and a lengthy finish, tart tannins still gripping the corners of my palate minutes after the last sip.
“This is incredible,” says Kat.
“This is the balance!” Pato shouts, throwing his hands in the air before pouring us his dessert rosé.
“The idea of this is when my grandson turns 18 years he will drink a bottle of wine with the girlfriend—sweet wine—and maybe he will remember the grandfather.”
I think he will. Luis Pato is a hard man to forget. Try his wine with whatever you want—it’s your experiment—and visit him online at www.luispato.com
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