This article was originally published in issue 15.

from Delta’s DDD – D magazine.

Organic wines are fashionable, popular and increasingly sought after. Adega Mayor, aware of the trend, has already converted 10 hectares of vineyard to organic production methods and has another 60 hectares in the conversion phase. In its range of organic wines there are whites, reds and rosés. “When we have more raw materials on hand, what we can show the consumer will be more interesting in terms of variety and complexity,” explains Carlos Rodrigues, winemaker at Adega Mayor.

Following the tradition of relating labels to the arts – Caiado linked to painting, single varietals to music, Adega Mayor Reserva to photography – the organic wines have Campo Maior flowers adorning their labels. It all started with an obsession of the creative director José Cabaço, who receives flowers at his house every 15 days and has taken to photographing them at night with his cell phone, under a lamp or illuminated by a flashlight. “It all started during the pandemic, when some guys created a home flower delivery service here in New York, the Botanical Brothers,” says the Portuguese creative, who has lived in the United States since 2005. “I really like flowers and, Historically, I always photographed them a lot.”

The images of the flowers, “more isolated explorations,” he describes, ended up on his Instagram account (@josecabaco), like, in fact, almost everything he photographs with his iPhone. “When she appeared [o Instagram], I must have been one of the first 100 users,” he guarantees. “Since then I have not picked up a machine again. [fotográfica].”

Among José Cabaço’s followers on the social network is Rita Nabeiro, general director of Adega Mayor, who, in a meeting to decide the labels of the brand’s organic selection wines, remembered his images of flowers. “It was one of those coincidences,” says José, who until 2023 worked as creative director at Adidas – he now has the same position at Rapha, a British brand of cycling products.

Ana Cunha, label designer at Adega Mayor, also speaks of a happy “coincidence”. “Instead of image banks, and as the brand seeks to elevate and support the arts and this is not always very visible in wines, we realized that this was an opportunity to invest in signature photography,” she says. “Rita already followed José Ricardo [Cabaço] and had already worked with him as creative director at Nike [cargo que o levou aos Estados Unidos]. His parallel photography work is very curious, it has a very interesting aesthetic acuity and a personal touch.”

Wildflowers went to Lisbon

In the spring of 2022, and in one of his work breaks between the Adidas headquarters in New York and Berlin, José Cabaço got into the car with the designer Ana Cunha and they traveled to Campo Maior, in Alentejo, to try to photograph the flowers. that arose in the vineyards of Adega Mayor. “The idea was to look for beauty in simplicity,” explains Ana.

Create a very beautiful poem with this image of the vineyards, with the wild flowers that grow naturally, some very visible, in thousands, and others tiny, which when closer are incredible.

However, photographing nature is not always easy. “When we went, there was a breeze and little sun and mobile phones always need a lot of light for everything to look really sharp. [nítidas]”, continues José “We tried several things, from photographing in the place itself, with white cardboard, to collecting some. [flores] and photograph in a place with less wind.”

The photographs chosen for the labels of the organic wines (red, white and rosé) ended up being taken in his house in Lisbon, next to a window. “Those classic photography devices,” laughs José Ana Cunha, the designer, happy with the result. “Instead of looking for more exuberant flowers, we find this exuberance in the simplicity of the spring flower, which is so ephemeral and yet so abundant. For example, the beauty of the poppy, at the same time so fragile,” she comments.

The label of the organic red wine, a blend of the Aragonês, Trincadeira and Castelão grape varieties, with notes of currant, black cherry, raspberry and wild flowers, has the image of a poppy and ended up becoming one of the most emblematic of the selection ecological. . Carlos Rodrigues, winemaker at Adega Mayor, says that this “expression of purity and flower of the countryside” is precisely what is expected from these wines, launched in 2022. “It is what we try to print on the bottles,” he says. “It should be as natural as possible, without being a wine with defects, as people usually associate with this process.” [biológico].”

In 2022, Adega Mayor obtained the sustainable production certification from the Alentejo Wine Sustainability Program, being the tenth producer in the region to achieve this. A year earlier, at the end of 2021, it launched its first organic wines, from another range, Esqussos, the result of the conversion of the Herdade da Godinha vineyard to this production method.

Simple, elegant and organic wines.

There the wine is made in the “most natural way possible,” Carlos continues.

“There are no products and we even try to be a little extreme. We take the grapes, ferment them with native yeasts, zero sulfur, and isolate the wine, so that there is no possible contamination from others that come from non-organic vineyards. From there we built the lot in a very simplistic way, always paying close attention to the purest part.”
For the white wine label, 100% Roupeiro, from an organic vineyard of half a hectare and in a production limited to 1,500 bottles, the flower chosen was the saramago, in an “interesting combination between the simplicity of the nuance and the composition”, says designer Ana Cunha.

The rosé, from the Castelão grape variety, follows the same line, with a more unknown plant, the fumaria, as the protagonist. “They are simple and elegant wines,” describes winemaker Carlos Rodrigues. “It can be every day, on a terrace, but those who want to join us at the table are also up to the task,” he explains.

For José Cabaço, who already had his own advertising agency in Portugal, Home, founded in 2001, it was the first time he worked with wine labels. After the flowers for Seleção Bio wines, Adega Mayor asked him for other photographs for special and customizable labels, such as those for Father’s Day, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. “They ended up choosing several things, [uma fotografia de uma] a shadow of my daughter and I piggybacking on the beach, a neon heart I had taken in Berlin, etc. But the floral work was the most interesting because we really went to photograph the flowers that are part of the ingredients and the region, in a very lo-fi way, just with our cell phone.”