Niepoort Nat'Cool Bairrada Tinto Drink Me 2024
Niepoort Nat'Cool Bairrada Tinto Drink Me 2024
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Niepoort Nat'Cool Bairrada Tinto Drink Me 2024

Niepoort
$24.00

Grape: Baga
Vintage: 2024
Type: Red

Dirk Niepoort, a legend in the Portuguese wine industry responded to a growing demand—both locally and internationally—for wines that are fun, approachable, naturally made, and perfect for everyday enjoyment. The Nat'Cool line was designed to buck the trend of heavy, serious, high-alcohol wines from Portugal. Instead, Dirk created a movement based on a strict manifesto: the wine must be made naturally with native grapes, be low in alcohol, highly affordable, and so effortlessly drinkable "smashable" and bottled in a signature one-liter format.

This vintage is known for its pale ruby color and a lively, expressive nose featuring fresh strawberries, dried roses, and earthy pomegranate seeds. On the palate, it is exceptionally fresh and energetic, balancing juicy red fruit flavors with a touch of Mediterranean herbs, a distinct saline finish, and a fine tannic bite. Vinified using carbonic maceration with wild yeasts and minimal sulfur, the wine has a low alcohol content of 12% and a slight natural effervescence, making it a quintessential "glou-glou" wine. It balances snappy, refreshing acidity with ultra-fine, whisper-light tannins. A vibrant, and surprisingly saline finish, with a refreshing twist of pink grapefruit and crushed stone.

The grape variety: 100% Baga. Historically, Baga is known for being thick-skinned, intensely inky, and fiercely tannic—often requiring a decade in a cellar just to become approachable. Niepoort completely flips that on its head. By sourcing fruit from old vines (40 to 100 years old) grown on calcareous clay soils and utilizing carbonic maceration, he extracts all the vibrant, high-toned fruit of Baga without any of its aggressive, mouth-drying tannins.

Niepoort is one of Portugal's most influential family wine houses, founded in 1842 and transformed in the modern era by fifth-generation winemaker Dirk Niepoort. Long respected for traditional Port, the family became equally important to the rise of dry Douro wine when Dirk began working with old-vine field blends and released Redoma in the early 1990s. Niepoort combines lagares, long aging and historic cellar practices with restless experimentation across the Douro and other Portuguese regions. Today the next generation continues a style defined by freshness, native varieties and finesse, showing that Portugal's great wines can be both deeply traditional and radically open-minded.