Casa de Eufemia

As a grower-producer of Port, Casa Santa Eufemia is a delicious anomaly in Douro, where most producers either grow or vinify grapes. Drawing knowledge and traditions from over 100 years of family winemaking history, today brothers Lucia and Pedro Carvalho craft aged Tawny Port and a small range of dry bottlings from their maritime-influenced terroir.

For more than a century, legal constraints deprived the world of Casa Santa Eufemia wines. Bemardo Rodrigues de Carvalho founded the estate in 1894, and while they spent decades making Port, they couldn’t legally vinify, bottle, or export it until Portugal joined the European Union in 1986. Since then, they’ve been using the estate’s stock of extraordinarily old reserve wines for 20-, 30-, and 40-year-old Tawny Ports that date back to long before Pedro and Lucia started making wine.

The estate’s 30 hectares of vineyards sit on the left bank of the Douro River, in one of the oldest demarcated wine regions in the world. Near the western edge of Cima-Corgo, this area enjoys more maritime influence than most of the Douro region, giving it a slightly cooler climate. These old vineyards are classic Portuguese field blends, where assorted grapes coexist on the same block.

The estate is home to more than 20 different native varieties—everything from classic grapes like Touriga Nacional to more obscure ones that are nearing extinction in Portugal. The brothers know the aromas, color, and structure each sub-plot will produce, and they’ve designated certain ones for special Tawny Port bottlings.

Planted on the Douro Valley’s iconic hillsides, these terraced, dry-farmed vineyards are too steep for machinery, so Casa Santa Eufemia’s seasoned workers harvest them manually. In the cellar, they age their reserve wines in large, old oak balseiro and pipas, continuing the family’s dedication to deeply complex Tawny Ports while crafting a few dry Douro DOC red and white wines to explore the diverse facets of their estate’s terroir.