Casal Santa Maria is an estate located in Casas Novas, a village near Colares, inside the famous Origin Denomination that carries the same name. With a history that goes back to the beginning of the 18th century, this lush estate fell into decay and was abandoned when baron Bodo von Bruemmer bought it in the 1960s.
But the idea of producing wine didn’t arise immediately. The property was in ruins and it took von Bruemmer and his wife five years to rebuild it. Shortly after they settled, they lived as small farmers, raising cattle and growing vegetables. In the 1970s, they switched to breeding Arabian horses, quickly becoming one of Portugal’s biggest and best stud farms, an activity that was abruptly ended by the African horse sickness that struck the Iberian Peninsula in the late eighties.
After von Bruemmer’s wife died in 1994, he had about 200 different types of roses planted in her memory and continued to live in the property, spending some years in a sort of relative retirement that would be interrupted by a sudden will to become a viticulturist. It happened in 2006, when the baron was already 96 years old. After a serious surgery in Switzerland, he woke up inspired to make wine. The project started three weeks after he returned home and the first vineyards were planted only six months later, restoring a tradition that had been interrupted for more than 100 years!
When Bodo von Bruemmer died in 2016, at the age of 105, Casal Santa Maria was already one of the reference producers of Colares, always focused in making better and better wines. Nowadays, it’s his grandson, Nicholas von Bruemmer, that’s ensuring the continuity of the project.
The vineyards are planted in a unique terroir: the slopes of the Serra de Sintra (Sintra mountain range), facing the Atlantic Ocean, which influence, with cool nights and frequent fresh, misty mornings, gives the wines unique traits. In particular, the Sauvignon Blanc plot is only 200 m from the sea, planted over clay soils with a top layer of sand, with large granite outcrops and very rich in organic matter due to the horse farm that once existed in the property.
The hand-picked Sauvignon Blanc grapes that went into this wine were thoroughly selected before crushed and pressed. Maceration in contact with the skin followed. Fermentation occurred in stainless steel vats and maturation over fine lees, with occasional stirring, took place until the end of April of 2016, when it was bottled.
This 2015 unoaked Sauvignon Blanc remains very clean and fresh, with a vaguely oily touch in the mouth that contrasts with its green character, citric and herbaceous, that the time in bottle is beginning to round into softer nuances of pear, together with spicy notes. Overall, this is a nicely textured and balanced white that brings a very appealing mineral dryness to the palate and ends with a salty finish.
