Editor’s Note: During our month long dedication to Cava wine, we’ve made a little detour to the west, bringing you a unique style of sparkling wine elaborated in the heart of Portugal. However, when starting this article, I quickly realized that I dove into a subject that few have tackled. What is listed in wine encyclopedias, wine journals, websites and Portuguese books barely skim topic as to what defines a Portuguese sparkling wine. Try looking for information on exports, pricing or major producers, and you might as well throw in the towel. Hence, what I’ve compiled below is my best effort at trying to understand this topic with the help of from Viniportugal (Thank you Maria Joao!). I will be adding more details to this article, or posting additional articles, on the topic. In the meantime, if anyone can offer information, please don’t hesitate to chime in! I would love for us to put together something more comprehensive, and dare is say, accurate.

For those of you who can time travel back to August, when we attended a mask exhibit and wine tasting in Lisbon, you may remember an article where we essentially gushed adoringly over sparkling wines made by Murganheira, a Portuguese wine producer based in the Tras-o-Montes region. Today, with a bottle of Quinta da Lixa Espumante Bruto from DOC Vinho Verde, sitting in front of me, we thought it would prudent for us to give you a more expansive understanding of what it means to produce sparkling wine in Portugal.

Espumante, pronounced esh-pu-man-te, is the Portuguese version of a sparkling wine. And unlike Cava, produced solely in northern climates, Espumante is not only produced in the northern wet region of Vinho Verde, …