Filipa Pato & William Wouters

The Free Bacchus Story

A Belgian distributor bought half of Filipa Pato’s first wine. It sold some of the bottles to an Antwerp chef, William Wouters, and in 2008 she married him. He was a sommelier too, and owned Pazzo, a brasserie and wine bar; his family had been Antwerp restaurateurs for five generations. Hers had been making wine for as long. Later he sold his restaurant, and the couple moved to Bairrada full-time with their two sons, into a house built over the cellar in Óis do Bairro, a village of 200 people.

Filipa, a chemical engineer from Coimbra, is the daughter of Luís Pato, and her grandfather was the first grower in Bairrada to bottle wine under his own name. Even so, when she came back to Bairrada for her first harvest in 2001, she had no vineyards of her own. She rented vines, and her grandmother let her use the family’s nineteenth-century winery at Amoreira da Gândara without paying rent. She bottled that first wine in 2003.

Bairrada lies close to the Atlantic, on limestone and clay, and the couple’s vineyards are 15 km from the ocean. Its red grape is Baga, a name that means ‘berry’. Baga makes reds with more acidity than most and more tannin, the drying grip you also get from strong tea. Young, they can be rigid and austere; they are wines for keeping. Bical, the white grape, is fresh. Filipa compares the whole region with Burgundy, pointing to the soils, the small parcels and a difficult red grape. Sparkling wine is a local tradition too. The couple use only native grapes, Baga, Bical, Arinto, Cercial and Maria Gomes, and set out, in their own words, to ‘create authentic wines without makeup’. Their top wine, Nossa Missão Baga Pre-Phylloxera, comes from just over half a hectare of old Baga vines. The 2023 ran to 720 bottles and 45 magnums, and the producer says it should age very well for more than 35 years.

They had never used herbicides, and at the end of 2014 they began converting the vineyards to biodynamics, a stricter form of organic farming that humid Atlantic weather makes harder still. 2014 had been a wet, disastrous vintage for Baga, and Filipa remembers picking with two kilos of clay on each foot. After the switch, yields fell for three years before they recovered. The rows are too narrow for a horse and plough, and everything has to be done by hand, which, Filipa says, is why the animals came in: sheep, pigs and chickens, with a mule to keep the sheep moving. The pigs are the couple’s own cross of Bísaro with small Vietnamese pigs, and they eat a lot of grapes — the couple don’t mind. Fennel and fava beans were planted to draw the snails off the vines.

The estate is certified organic, though not every bottle is. The EU certificate names no wine, so which wines count as organic comes from the producer’s own labelling. Six of the wines, Nossa Missão and both Nossa Calcário wines among them, are marked “Certified Bio”. Seven more, including the solera-aged sparkling wine built on Filipa’s first harvest, are still marked as in conversion, and the certificate allows non-organic wine to be made alongside the organic without saying how much. Demeter, the biodynamic association, lists the estate but names no wine. The couple sell by allocation, the United States is their main export market, and every January they run out.