Choose a winery
Adega Mayor
This is a winery worth seeing even if you don't drink wine. It was designed by Álvaro Siza Vieira, a Pritzker laureate, and it's a clean white volume lying over the Herdade das Argamassas, right in the middle of the vineyard: Portugal's first designer winery. The rooftop terrace looks out over the whole Alentejo. Rui Nabeiro built it in his own hometown, Campo Maior, and the visit starts there: a film in the auditorium tells you where everything that's about to happen comes from, before you go down to see how the wine is made. Then comes the tasting, and from there everyone chooses how far to go — there are eight different ways to be here, from one hour to a full day. And there are two things that make it fit where others don't: it opens seven days a week until six in the evening, so you can visit after a morning of golf without having to negotiate anything. And it's a stone's throw from Badajoz, right on the road you take into Portugal from Andalusia.
Photographs courtesy of Adega Mayor, property of the establishment
Eight ways to be here
The visit with tasting
The film in the auditorium, the tour of the winery and a tasting of two of the house's wines, finishing on the terrace. The entry point, and the one with the widest capacity: a large group can come without warning ahead.
The visit with tasting and tapas
The same visit with three wines and a selection from the land: a cheese board, a charcuterie board, bread with olive oil.
Wine and chocolate
Single-varietal wines — each grape tasted on its own — against different artisan chocolates. The one that works best on anyone who says wine tasting isn't for them.
The picnic in the vineyard
You visit the winery, then walk down — or drive — to the vineyard itself, and sit under a cork oak: recipes from the region and the house's wines, with the white winery in the background. From two people. The day's plan for a couple.
Winemaker for a day
Making wine: you taste three single-varietal wines separately, decide the proportion, and the blend that comes out of it is bottled under your own label, to take home with you, with a t-shirt and a diploma. The house proposes it as a team activity — it's the best thing we have for a corporate trip.
The visit with wine workshop
The serious step up: down into the barrel room, six wines tasted and commented, a blind tasting, and an aroma experience. For whoever already knows wine and wants to be told something new.
The wine course
A full day, run by Donatília Vivas, the house's head of oenotourism, a WSET 3 sommelier with twenty years in the trade: how it's produced, how it's kept, how it's served and how it's tasted, with a diploma and a gift at the end. The day solved, with no golf involved.
The tasting with the winemaker
Two and a half hours with Carlos Rodrigues, the house's winemaker, and a selection that's never the same: he chooses it and he talks you through it. It's the one that goes furthest up the list, and it's never repeated.
It sounds like a small detail, and it's the thing that changes everything. Our other wineries almost always force a choice between a morning of golf and the wine; this one doesn't. You play, you eat, and by four you're in the winery, any day of the week, Sundays included. It's the only one in the whole catalogue you can say that about.
How to book it
Adega Mayor is booked through us: we set the time, notify the winery and arrange the transfer if you want it. It's often the natural stop entering Portugal from Andalusia — it sits right on the road, by Badajoz — or on a stay based in Évora, an hour and ten minutes away. It also works well as a corporate or incentive trip (Winemaker for a Day, from six to twelve people) or as the day nobody plays: the wine course takes up the whole day. Visits run in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and other languages on request; the building is accessible, with a lift. Tell us who's travelling and what they feel like, and we'll close it with the time already set, the price in firm and the booking already made.