Selected vintages · 01 / 04
Red field blend, 2021
Fourteen old-vine parcels picked in the same cold week and fermented together in one lagar, the way the founding families did it when nobody could afford a vat of their own.
Read the vintage notes
Selected vintages · 02 / 04
White, high terraces, 2023
Rabigato and Códega from the top three walls of the valley, pressed before the sun clears the ridge. Twelve growers, all of them over seventy, all of them still climbing.
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Selected vintages · 03 / 04
Skin-contact white, 2022
Three weeks on the skins in the cement tanks we were told to tear out in 1994. We kept them. The wine is amber, dry and a little stubborn, like the people who argued for it.
Read the vintage notes
Selected vintages · 04 / 04
Single-terrace red, 2020
One wall of vines planted in 1931 and never replanted. The parcel is too steep for a tractor and too small to sell on its own, so the whole cooperative carries it, one vintage a year.
Read the vintage notesThe cooperative
Socalco began in 1958, when eleven households on the Lousa walls admitted that none of them could afford a press alone. They built one, together, at the bottom of the hill, and agreed to carry their grapes down to it.
The rule has not changed: every member brings every grape, every lot is weighed in front of whoever grew it, and the vote on what goes into each bottle is one family, one hand. It is slow. It is also why the old terraces are still farmed.
What we do for you
Four ways in, from a lot of your own to a seat at lunch. Open one to read how it works.
Bring us your grapes and leave with your own wine. We press, ferment and bottle small lots under the grower’s name, from 300 bottles up, and the label says whose hill it came from.
Buy a twelfth of one 228-litre barrel of the coming vintage. You taste it from the wood each spring and collect your twenty-five bottles when it is ready, not when the calendar says so.
Six weeks each September, twelve places per week. You carry crates up the walls in the morning, sort at the press house after lunch, and eat with the growers at the long table.
Saturday lunches in the old cement-tank room for twenty people at most. Cooked by whichever member family is on the rota, poured from whatever is open, and paid at the door.
Harvest 2027 · Sept 6 – Oct 15
Twelve places a week, six weeks a year. You pick, you sort, you eat at the long table with the families who farm the walls. Bring boots; we have the crates.
Reserve a harvest week