100% natural taste
Industrial techniques are a fix part of the production of our food and drinks. Even if it is not declared on the products a lot of chemical substances are used, to make the processes easier, faster or just more reliable. Often the aim is the standardized product as the customers do not accept any differences in taste or color. If you are looking for industry wine like this, you are totally wrong at the Secret Garden Winery. We do not use any chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides in the vineyard, or in the cellar.
We grow wine at its most simple way – 100% natural. That sounds easy, but it is not. For exemple the soils in mountains of the Algarve are very poor, and our vines starve. Some doses of the modern chemical fertilizers would give them much more power. But we do not need this extra growth as the basis of our naturally concentrated wine is the very low yield. Some years the use of copper and sulfur for treating the vines against cannot be circumvented.
The picking of the grapes is done 100% by hand, to start the selection in the vineyard. This is the only way to prevent damage and varying quality of the grapes. After the harvest we wait for the fermentation to start by the wild yeasts that are naturally living on the grapes. These yeasts are one reason for the different taste of every single vintage, as the types of yeast change every year. The only ingredient we have to use is a little sulfur dioxide to stabilize the wine for transport and storage.
Air, Earth, Water, Sun, the footsteps of the winegrower as fertilizer and an oak barrel, that’s all we need.