417 readers have left

In the past few days I’ve had 417 people unsubscribe from this newsletter as a result of the posts I’ve been publishing about the wine being on sale.

Which feels like quite a lot. I mean, it is a lot.

And more will unsubscribe after reading this.

But, reframe.

Hundreds of bottles of our Sercial Pét-Nat 2025 are going out to 10 countries.

The average order value has been €111.

Which means people have been buying three, four, six bottles at a time, of a wine they were neither looking for nor have tasted, co-made by me, someone with little to no winemaking experience.

(unless you count the plonk I used to knock up in my kitchen back in the UK).

And the biggest sales day of the week was the day after we owned up to the shipping mess.

What I take from this is, you guys seem to trust me.

And this trust is just so incredibly meaningful. I will guard this trust with everything! It is wild to me because what the hell do I even know about wine, or anything really.

(I’ll tell you what I do know to those who have ordered: you will freakin’ love it, I promise.)

So, thank you for putting your trust in me. It really means silly amounts.

Unless a series of bizarre turn of events take place for the rest of today, we won’t be selling the full run of 1,200 bottles, so I’m not going to pretend they’re 'running out’.

But what I will tell you is this is definitely the last day you will be able to buy them and the sale closes tonight (midnight Fri 21st August BST).

Because this weekend, Rui will be relocating the unsold bottles to a different storage facility a few km away, to sell them to his Portuguese clients directly.

Unless you plan on visiting Portugal in the next few weeks and making a trip to one of these specific clients, you won’t be able to buy these bottles after today.

So if you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time.

And if you missed it earlier this week, the prices are lower than what you would have seen on Monday. We got the shipping wrong at launch and it's since been fixed.

Order Here

My final parting words to you on the wine are in the form of a few short behind the scenes video clips, to share a bit more of what the process involved — for those who like this stuff.

Yeast eat the sugar in grape juice, turning it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If you seal the wine in a bottle before the yeast have devoured all the sugar, the CO₂ has nowhere to go and instead dissolves into the wine.

This means bubbles.

Knowing exactly what moment to bottle is a fine art. Because if you seal the wine too early when there’s still a lot of sugar present, the amount of CO2 produced could explode the bottles.

Leave it too late and there won’t be enough sugar to make any bubbles at all = flat wine.

The ideal window is just a few grams of sugar wide.

The Cas’Amaro winemakers Ricardo (in this vid) and Gilberto were giving me daily Whatsapp updates at the time:

‘Could be in two days, depends if the heatwave comes.’

‘Wasn’t as warm as we expected. Storms this weekend. Might be early next week.’

The way they measure how much sugar is left is by measuring the density of the liquid (aka the ‘specific gravity’) with a hydrometer (it looks like a large glass thermometer), floated in a sample of the wine. The more sugar, the higher the reading.

Winemakers wait for a precise number then it’s all hands on deck to bottle and seal as fast as possible.

1,200 bottles of wine filled with this. And they only have one of these.

Hours.

Also, needs an unusual amount of concentration — hand / eye coordination, reflexes, monitoring three different liquid levels simultaneously to swap out at the right time.

Got a decent percentage of wine on both the floor and myself.

Was not kidding when I said fully handmade.

Winemaker Gilberto likes all types of music, including metal.

Here’s a clip of us being silly to Metallica’s Enter Sandman.

One must find ways to break up the hours.

And that’s (almost) a wrap!

Thank you for following along on this journey since last September, when I first shared that I’d be making a wine with my neighbours, Cas’Amaro.

A year later and I’m really proud of what we achieved. And to think there will be hundreds of bottles of it bringing joy to many around the world, is all flavours of awesome.

If you would like to be one of the few to ever try this wine, you have until:

23:59 BST, Friday 21st August.

Buy Now

Obrigada e saúde!