Quevedo - Port wine - Family-run - from the Douro

Quevedo farms 114 hectares of vineyards across six quintas in the Douro Valley, in the Cima Corgo and Douro Superior sub-regions. The diversity of the vineyards produces grapes with different aromas and flavours, which help to create the Port wines.

The owners, Oscar Quevedo and Beatriz Morais Quevedo, both come from families with long and rich histories of growing grapes and making Port wine. On Oscar’s side, the tradition of winemaking dates back to 1889, when his ancestor Abel Gouveia Costa planted the first vines in Valongo dos Azeites, São João da Pesqueira. He was followed by his son Raul Gouveia Costa, who brought prosperity to the business. Then came João Batista Quevedo, Raul’s son-in-law, who expanded the vineyards onto new land.

Beatriz’s family roots are on the northern/right bank of the Douro, in Linhares de Ansiães, in the Carrazeda district. The Beatriz family’s main property is Quinta da Alegria, which has a railway station bearing the same name as the winery. At the end of the 1970s, Beatriz Morais Fernandes and Óscar Quevedo decided to live and work in São João da Pesqueira: Beatriz was a doctor at the local hospital and Óscar was a lawyer and notary. They remained closely involved in growing and making wine and passed this passion on to their children, Claudia and Oscar Junior, who both work in the family business. In the 1980s, they expanded the production area, and in the early 1990s, they built the winery that is now Quevedo’s headquarters.

Oscar Senior founded Quevedo. He was born in 1946 in Vidigueira, Alentejo. He studied law in Coimbra, where he met his wife Beatriz. They have lived in São João da Pesqueira since 1982. Early in his career, he worked as a lawyer and notary, combining these roles with business projects focused on growing grapes and making Port wine. He bought his first vineyard in 1977, and in 1983 they carried out their first major project: planting the vineyards at Quinta Vale d’Agodinho. They built a new winery in 1990, where they still make wine today. In 1991, they made their first Port wine in this winery, marking the beginning of a new era for the family, as they began bottling Port wine under their own label, which had only become possible after Portugal joined the EU in 1986.

Since then, they have expanded their vineyard area to 112 hectares, plus 15 hectares of organically grown olive groves.

Oscar Junior is responsible for sales at Quevedo. He was born in 1983 in Viseu, a city where his parents lived for a few years before I was born. But the place he calls home is São João da Pesqueira, in the heart of the Douro Valley, where he lived with his mother and father, Beatriz and Oscar, and his sister Claudia. He spent almost his entire childhood there, among the vines and pipas (wine casks), where his parents and the three generations before them made Vinho Generoso, as the locals call Port wine.

In 2001, he went to university in Porto, where he studied economics until 2005. The five years he spent in Porto were a wonderful time in his life, during which he had truly remarkable experiences. The years he spent at university were really something special, because that was when he began to understand his family’s business. He discovered that wine was not just about romance, but also involved a great deal of drama and heartache.

After university, he got a job as a bank clerk and began his career in finance at the Portuguese bank BPI. A year later, he went to central Europe to work in finance in Switzerland, and at the end of 2007, he moved to Madrid, Spain. In March 2009, his grandfather João Quevedo died, which prompted him to return to Portugal in May 2009.

In July 2011, he married a wonderful Catalan woman, Nadia, who now lives with him in Porto. Nadia has worked at the Quevedo family business since February 2020. He tries to drive to the Douro every week and spend two or three days there. If he doesn’t show up at the Douro, it may be because he is visiting one of his customers in one of the 40 countries where Quevedo wines and Port wines are sold.

Claudia went to school in São João da Pesqueira and later in Coimbra, and began studying oenology in Vila Real in 1994. When she graduated in oenology in 1998, she spent six months at Barros & Almeida in Vila Nova de Gaia and returned to São João da Pesqueira in 1999. That was the year of her first harvest.

Since then, she has made Quevedo’s Port and Douro wines until Teresa Batista took over the production of Douro wines in 2013.

She is married to Fernando João Martins, and they live with their daughter Beatriz and their son João just 1 km from the winery. When she isn’t blending Port wines or checking the barrels, she might be playing with her children or her dogs, reading history books or watching films, but she certainly doesn’t watch football.