Conceito Tinto 2020

Conceito Tinto 2020 is the benchmark wine of Conceito Vinhos, made in the Douro Superior by winemaker Rita Marques. It comes from a field blend of very old vines (over 90 years), where more than 20 traditional grapes grow together, giving an elegant, structured profile.

The Wine Advocate
RP 94

Reviewed by: Mark Squires

The 2020 Tinto, the estate's flagship, is a field blend of very old vines (over 90 years), aged for 22 months in 50% new French oak and the rest in second-use French oak. It has 14.4% alcohol. On first review it impressed me with the intensity of its fruit flavour and concentration, but less so with its structure. For this winery and its typical style, it's a relatively dense wine, with very concentrated fruit. With six more months in bottle, it developed very well in that respect. It now shows more expressive fruit. It's always delicious. The tannins were and remain ripe, so they don't interfere much. That gives the wine a polished character, making it already enjoyable, exuberant and delicious. The caveat is that the fruit is still so young and undeveloped that you don't get everything the wine can offer if you open it now. You can dive in now, and I'm keeping the original start of the drinking window that recognises this, but two or three more years of development could make it much more expressive and subtle.

As polished and refined as it is, I wonder how well it will age. That limited my enthusiasm the first time, but the fruit shows so well now that this time I'll be more generous. It certainly won't fall apart in the foreseeable future, but it needs to show some ability to improve in the cellar over a reasonable period if it's to be a truly great Tinto from the estate. It has a good chance of that, but everyone will surely love that fruit.