The new Lisboa: Chinado

Simon visits João Tereso, a sound engineer turned winemaker with a penchant for breathing new life into old vineyards, and for crafting delicious natural wines in the Lisboa region.

João Tereso is a live sound engineer by trade. You're more likely to find him behind a large mixing console at a jazz festival than in a vineyard. But that all changed when he learned that his grandfather's old vineyard in Alcobaça was about to be sold by the family. Tereso had more than a little sentiment about the vines, as some of his earliest memories were of stomping grapes at grandpa's house - when he was no more than two years old.

Tereso's home region in Northern Lisboa is hardly prestigious for wine these days. Lisboa became the home of giant government-run cooperative wineries from the 1950s on, and its stock-in-trade was the production of bulk wine to be shipped to Portugal's African colonies. That image has stuck, and over the last few decades many growers switched from grapes to apples or pears - both much more lucrative, when the price of grapes can be as low as 30 euro-cents a kilo. Sadly, the apple and pear industries are far more polluting. Apple orchards are typically…