Anna Jørgensen, Cortes de Cima: Farming Well in Our Era of Climate Chaos

Today, the family estate (website) spans 64 hectares inland in Vidigueira and 35 on the coast near Vila Nova de Milfontes, down from 240 in Vidigueira alone.

As if Anna's wine journey, generational change and farming approach weren't interesting enough, she and I both work with the Simonit & Sirch pruning method and share a penchant for old trees and vines alike – a conversation we couldn't pass up!

Words by Milan Nestarec & Lucie Kohoutová, photos courtesy of Cortes de Cima

Let's start with a recent and fascinating non-wine endeavour of yours: you transplanted 2,000 centenarian olive trees that a neighboring property was uprooting for a super-intensive plantation. I find that quite impressive – what does it actually take to move a tree that old? Did all of them survive?

Thank you. Ultimately it was a labour of love and passion with the desire to preserve this precious genetic heritage and increase the biodiversity and beauty of our farm.

There are a few key things to do when transplanting old olive trees, like strong pruning. Or marking of the orientation of the tree, so that it is replanted in the same direction as it was originally. We do this by “marking the north”. Taking as much of the root system and adjacent soil (called the sapata in Portuguese) when the tree is uprooted and transplanted is essential.

Since the trees came from next door, each was replanted the day it was uprooted. And water and compost in the new pit are highly beneficial. We are happy to say that we had a pretty good success rate of around 95 %!

What was the motive behind what I assume was a huge undertaking – is it because the oil from old trees tastes better? Or did you want to do it for the sake of the trees themselves and preserving this natural heritage?

Unfortunately, the landscape in the lower Alentejo has been changing very fast, with the uprooting of traditional agriculture in place of industrialized agriculture. This started roughly 25 years ago with the completion of the nearby Alqueva dam, the largest manmade lake in Western Europe, which brought water to an otherwise dry region. This brought a heavy investment from Spain, with their modern super-intensive olive groves, as well as almond groves.

This brought the uprooting and destruction of the old genetic material – a much more sustainable form of agriculture that doesn’t require irrigation and chemicals to grow and was often part of this larger silvopastoral polyculture system.

These are being replaced by super-intensive plantations, of lesser quality but higher production varieties, which are massive monocultures, and rely heavily on irrigation and chemical farming.

The herbicide, pesticide and fungicide use is extensive, causing the erosion of the soil, pollution of aquifers, reduction of biodiversity and acceleration of desertification to this already fragile area.

This particular neighbouring farm had a beautiful centenarian olive grove that I grew up walking in, and we decided that we would try to save these trees which would otherwise be chopped up for firewood. At the same time, we had newly freed land from the lower-quality vineyards that we pulled up, so we were able to put these olive trees there, and use it as grazing land for our cattle.

But yes, the quality and nutritional value of the oil from the super-intensive olive groves is much lower compared to the traditional method. However, the yields are much higher and the production costs lower due to the ability to mechanize almost entirely the growing and harvesting process.

You have my respect, really. I hope the trees live long and prosper! Now back to the beginnings, no less intriguing your case: your parents arrived by sailboat from Malaysia and found Cortes de Cima with no electricity or running water, and slowly built it into one of the largest operations in the region, if I got it right. Can you tell us a bit more about this journey? What made them settle down there, of all places?

My parents met in Malaysia in the 1970s, where my Danish dad was working as a mechanical engineer on a palm oil plantation and my mother, originally from California, was on a business visit with her stepfather who was a commodity broker. After 6 years living there together, they decided to move back to Europe and buy a sailboat with the goal of finding a place to call home and start a new farming adventure. The boat eventually led them to the coast of Portugal in 1988, where they found a typical Alentejan farm that they decided to call home.

This was a pivotal time in the history of Portugal, which had recently opened itself up to the world with the 1974 Carnation Revolution, after nearly 50 years of dictatorship. It had also just joined the EU [or EEC, as it was known back then], in 1986.

How was it for you growing up there?

Unusually for the time, my parents decided to make the farm their primary residence, and place to start their family. I grew up there with my brother, and went to local Portuguese schools until the age of 14, after which we both went to a boarding school in Denmark.

I enjoyed growing up on a farm, it cemented my relationship with the natural world from an early age. I cherish the deep connection it gave me to the land, the people and culture of Alentejo.

You came to work in the family winery in 2019 and effectively reversed that scale — cutting the Vidigueira estate from 240 to 64 hectares, and keeping 35ha on the coast. What was the moment you became certain that shrinking was the right direction, rather than just adjusting course?

After high school, I worked the first vintage at my family winery, which I followed up with a vintage in the Barossa Valley and then in Burgundy. At that point I had realized that this was what I wanted to do and decided to formalize my knowledge with a winemaking and viticulture degree in Adelaide, Australia.

During the course of the degree and for a few years afterwards, I was able to gain experience working for a number of wineries in Australia, but also in New Zealand, California and France. I worked for wineries big and small, industrial and artisanal, conventional and biodynamic. This vast exposure gave me a really useful view of the diversity of the wine world, and more importantly where I saw myself in it.

In 2019 I came back home, after over 10 years living abroad, with curiosity about my family company and a strong belief in the still untapped wine potential of Portugal. I knew that I was driven by quality and sustainability and these were two pillars that I wanted to drive further at my family’s estate.

My parents were farming conventionally, with a heavy reliance on irrigation, mechanisation and agro-chemicals in the fields and additives and processing in the cellar. This was how they produced almost 2 million bottles per year, of a wine that could compete with other Portuguese wines in the under €5 category on the supermarket shelves.

Other premium wines were made, such as Incógnito, but the farming and winemaking remained largely the same. There was clearly a conflict between the status quo and my guiding pillars of sustainability and quality.

That’s an enormous shift to make – how did you approach it?

As most of my experience had so far been in the cellar, rather than in the vineyards, I relied heavily on external consultants to help examine and determine the potential of our vineyards and soils. Luckily we have been able to work with some of the best in the industry and the most influential of these were Claude and Lydia Bourgignon, Pedro Parra, Marco Simonit and Georg Meissner – we still work with the latter two today. They helped me understand what we had on the farm, what could be improved and where it could take us, and inform the vision going forward.

Generational change is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for real change in a family business and so we took this opportunity to rethink the whole business model for the next 20-30 years.

At the same time, consumer habits were starting to change globally, with consumption decreasing and a higher attention to quality and sustainability coming into consumer consideration. From the time I took over from my parents in 2020 until today, the world has been changing ever more rapidly and we are living in times of big transformation and instability.

Between the escalating climate crisis, the COVID pandemic, wars and conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, the Trump presidency, the world is a very different place. And the wine business has definitely not been shielded from the effect of these macro-economic geopolitical, and climatic issues.

Less is more, small is beautiful, we can farm on a human scale, as true custodians of the land, making better and healthier produce, and create a business that is more resilient to external market vulnerabilities. This is our goal.

Your parents built something that made them one of the biggest names in the region. Was there resistance to unwinding that scale, or changing the whole management from conventional & intensive to regenerative organic — from them, from your brother Thomas, from the team? Or had everyone already arrived at the same conclusion before you took over?

Of course there was resistance, there always is to some degree. Change is the only constant in life yet it is one of the things that most people fear and have the hardest time accepting.

It was probably the hardest for my dad. He is from a very different time than I am: he was born in 1940, and grew up after WW2, with the promise of the miracles of the first agrochemicals. Today, we have the power of hindsight and, although agrochemicals still dominate food production, we know how severe the consequences of their use are to all living things, be that the land, animals, or us humans. Considering that there are 2 generations between us, it would be strange to hope that we would agree on most things!

Meanwhile, my mother and brother were very supportive regarding the direction of the changes, so we managed to go through with them even though my father was sceptical.

As for the team, it was a mixed bag, some people were really excited about the changes and became some of the main drivers of this transformation, others were rather indifferent, while some were very against the changes and either left of their own accord or had to be asked to leave.

You farm two very different terroirs: Vidigueira sits inland, on limestone and granite with clay, while your coastal site at Vila Nova de Milfontes is sandy, silty gravel. How different is the winemaking for each of these places? Or does your approach stay consistent and it's the land itself and/or varieties doing the differentiating?

We only have one cellar in Vidigueira, so the grapes from the coast are transported in a refrigerated truck during harvest. I would say that the winemaking itself is pretty similar, and it’s the viticulture that we adapt the most to each site due to the very different climate and soils.

On the coast, we are dealing with a maritime climate with moderate, constant temperatures, fog and high humidity, reaching up to 100% humidity most mornings during summer. So we adjust our pruning and canopy management to promote airflow and reduce congestion of grape bunches. Leaf plucking on the morning sun side is something we practice on certain varieties. We also need to spray more due to the higher disease pressure.

And Vidigueira?

In Vidigueira, we are in a Mediterranean climate, where humidity levels are generally low, we do have thermal amplitude, so cool nights and warm to hot days in summer, and heatwaves are more and more common. Here it is imperative that we adapt our pruning and canopy management to promote as much shade as possible to the grapes.

We have developed our VSP trellis system into a more suitable umbrella canopy structure, where the shoots grow upwards initially and then downwards over the grapes. Where we have enough vigour, we can even do a very early shoot thinning, to promote lateral growth. Disease pressure here is relatively low and some years we can get away without spraying some parcels.

How was the 2026 vintage for you? Here it was quite an unusual year, extremely dry and hot – luckily we got some rain recently that delayed the harvest, but long time it looked like a very early one. I saw you just finished harvesting as we organised this interview, so I’m wondering how things look down South in Portugal – are you getting some extreme weather and crazy events, or are your two terroirs doing as you’re used to?

2026 was off to a very wet start, with one of the wettest winters in recent history, with over 600mm of rain between December and February. Although it delayed some of our winter vineyard operations like pruning we are only grateful for rainfall in the Alentejo these days, in any shape and form, and as we keep full ground cover in our vineyards through spontaneous and sown cover crop and no tillage, we are able to retain and infiltrate a lot of the rainwater into our subsoils, avoiding erosion, and creating water reserves for the rest of what was an otherwise dry season.

From there on spring was mild and dry, keeping things easy from a disease management perspective and summer was hot and dry, as is becoming the norm these days. Heatwaves are a given in summer, and a strong one in the first part of July quickstarted our earliest harvest in history, on the 22nd of July!

You worked with terroir expert Pedro Parra, using electromagnetic conductivity mapping and soil pits, to decide which plots to keep. What made you decide on this technique? And was there a result that surprised you or overturned something you thought you already knew about a plot?

I was curious about Pedro’s work, having read his book “Terroir Footprints” and was intrigued by this method and using scientific data collection to determine where the differences in the soil may lie to decide where to open the pits.

Adding that to Pedro’s unmatched experience in evaluating soil pits with a perspective as to what kind of wine could be produced from it was a great tool for us to speed up the learning process of our terroirs, which otherwise could have taken decades of harvests and observations.

Often the findings made sense with what we already observed – a struggling vineyard was planted on soil that was too shallow to nourish it properly – but sometimes we would be blown away by the soil diversity that you could have in just a few square meters which wouldn’t be evident from above the ground.

For example, we've turned a 1-hectare plot into 4 different vinifications, based on the differences we found in the soil, so we now have 4 different resulting wines.

Your "Trilogia de Terroirs" mirrors this soil diversity – separate vinifications of grapes from sand, granite, and limestone parts of the same hill, instead of blending them. What made you want to isolate those differences in the glass — and has tasting them side by side changed how you think about the rest of your range?

The “Trilogia de Terroirs” was born from the work we had done with the soil studies, and by vinifying these sub-plots separately and feeling their differences so clearly in the glass. We wanted to bring this experience to everyone who was curious about soils and wine, so we decided to bottle them.

Getting to understand so clearly our different soils and the type of wine they can produce has helped us greatly in our vinifications, by letting the soil decide what cuvée the vineyard will go to from the get go.

Furthermore, it has allowed us to go to a next level of detail regarding our understanding of the quality potential for each block – one plot that used to be vinified all together actually has a silty sandy limestone part with a very high quality potential and another part with more ordinary heavy clay. So we now pick and vinify them separately, producing two wines of inherently different quality potentials which can each go into a different blend accordingly, instead of mixing it all together from the beginning.

One thing we have in common is working with the Simonit & Sirch team and pruning according to their method. If my info is correct, you’ve been doing it for about six years, about the same time we have. I'm very curious what led you to it – was there a specific problem you were trying to solve, or was it more about refining your overall approach to the vines?

We’ve been working with Simonit since 2019, and learning and applying their methods of soft pruning and general vineyard architecture has been a major game changer for us. When I arrived back at my family vineyard in 2019, one of the big viticultural issues was trunk disease, and the unfortunate realisation that the oldest vines – around 30 years old at the time – were the ones with more issues regarding production and quality, when you would hope that they would be producing the best fruit at that age.

During their visit, Claude and Lydia Bourgignon highlighted the importance of improving our pruning technique in order to combat this early health decline of our vines and recommended Simonit as an option. I had also heard about Marco’s work in Australia and was curious about his techniques, so we asked them to come and make an assessment in fall 2019.

Since then, we have been working together, continuously training our team on respectful pruning techniques to build healthy strong vines, increasing longevity, with plant architecture that is the most adapted to our local conditions.

Were you the first in the region to adopt it? How did people around you react – have other producers followed, or does everyone else still stick to the old, established pruning system?

Our region is dominated by large producers, with a more industrial approach to farming and viticulture, and there is a strong focus on quantity over quality or value. As such, much of the old knowledge of respectful pruning has been lost, and a strong focus on mechanization of vineyards has become the main goal. It is also uncommon for producers in our area to have their own stable vineyard team, which is essential if you want skilled work to be carried out.

For these reasons, pruning is still not an area that most producers in our region are investing in. However, with regards to our vineyard crew, they were quite fast to adopt these soft pruning principles, as much of it is coherent with how things were done in the past, before the strong focus on industrialization and mechanization of vineyards arrived in the region.

For me, this method was a genuine game changer — in retrospect, I don't understand how we could even prune like we used to, going by what we were taught in school or at home. Once we switched to Simonit & Sirch, the old way completely stopped making sense. I also came to realise that, in our case, 50% of the result isn't the pruning itself but the very thorough spring shoot thinning at the start of the growing season. I could name ten details that improved our vines' vitality and the quality of the grapes as a result. What was the biggest shift for you — something you weren't able to achieve under the old style of management? I know it's a whole way of thinking about how the plant works, but if you can, could you be specific?

I completely agree with you, the very rigorous shoot thinning is just as important as the pruning for us. I would say the biggest shift for us from working in this way – allowing the vines to branch, developing these secondary structures, with a strong and clear sap flow, increasing the amount of live wood for carbohydrate and nutrient storage – is having vineyards that are stronger, healthier, more connected to their terroir and more resilient. I really believe this is fundamental for farming well in our era of climate chaos.

You're seeking out old, indigenous vineyards and taking cuttings for massale selection. Another thing we share – in my case, I'd even say an obsession, hah. Have you come across material in Alentejo that isn't in any official variety record — and if so, what do you do with a vine you can't identify?

This is something we have been working on, also with the help of Simonit, to preserve the old genetic material from the region and to find varieties that are better adapted to our place and evermore challenging climatic conditions, like drought and heatwaves in summer.

We have been taking cuttings, grafting them onto our own vineyards and vinifying experimental lots to try to understand what kind of wines these varieties could make in our terroir.

For now, our main goal is to understand the kind of wine that can be produced from these old grapes and to experiment with readapting the bush vine structure that is still present in these old vineyards today.

Regarding the identification, luckily there are still ampelography experts in the region that can help us with this, as well as a very useful national resource called PORVID, that has collected and preserved most of the old varieties in the country.

You've reintroduced geese, chickens, sheep, donkeys, and cows after your parents' generation had moved away from that kind of mixed farm. Since montado, the traditional Alentejo agroforestry landscape, already blends cork and holm oak with grazing underneath, is the animals' land actually separate from the montado you're expanding, or do the two overlap by design? And where do the vines fit into that same rotation?

Indeed the traditional montado is a silvopastoral system [an agricultural system that purposefully combines trees, forage plants, and livestock grazing on the same piece of land, editor’s note] that integrates animal and vegetal agriculture and this is something that we are reviving at our farm.

The sheep graze in the montado and olive groves during the vines growing season and are moved into the vineyards after the grape harvest, maintaining a sort of low-intensity rotational grazing system.

As for the cows and donkeys, we have several fenced areas consisting of centenarian olive groves where we do holistic rotational grazing during the vines growing season, and are working on fencing in order to be able to bring the cows into all of the vineyards during winter.

The chickens are also moved into the vineyard in winter and spring to help control the snail population that can be a problem for the vineyards in our limestone soils.

You mention learning from Georg Meissner's biodynamic thinking. How exactly does it translate to farming in your particular place? I suppose you’re not following some “recipe” – was there a practice of his that simply didn't fit Alentejo's climate, that you had to adapt or drop?

We have gradually introduced biodynamics since 2022, with Georg’s help. It’s true that we are not following a recipe but rather look to it for inspiration, as part of the “toolkit” we have to grow grapes and improve the health of the farm. One thing that we have not adopted is the frequent tilling of soils often used in organic and biodynamic farming.

In our hot and dry Mediterranean climate, we believe we need to do everything we can to protect our soils from erosion, as organic matter takes a long time to build up here. We prefer to maintain plant roots in the ground year round, and in late spring we crimp – roll the ground cover in order to create a carpet that will protect the soil microbiology from direct UV exposure.

Your whites tend to be very fresh and low on alcohol – 10, 11 % ABV. Is that a style you’re deliberately after, or rather something the Atlantic terroir “dictates” ? And would you say these are your bestsellers, or even an “easy sell” given the consumer preference for lighter style?

The lower ABV on the whites is definitely something that is influenced by the coastal climate in which they are grown. The vineyards are situated just 3km from the Atlantic, so temperatures are heavily moderated by the ocean and the foggy mornings and afternoons during summer slow down photosynthesis and sugar accumulation significantly allowing us to pick ripe grapes in the end of August or beginning of September at relatively low alcohol levels.

Our whites are definitely popular and tend to sell out quite fast, I think both for the lighter style and for the way they convey the saltiness from this maritime terroir.

You’re also making Palhete, the traditional Portuguese wine made from both white and red grapes, as the old vineyards were often mixed field blends. We have a similar thing, called ryšák – literally “ginger-haired” – here in Moravia, made for similar reasons… How was this project born?

It’s a fun collaboration project which we make with Daniel Niepoort, Dirk Niepoort’s eldest son, and his wife Kalina. They are both dear friends and we share many things in common, be it farming philosophies or being in multi-generational family businesses. It started in 2021, when Dani and Kalina were holidaying in a campervan and managed to come by our farm as our harvest usually begins a few weeks before theirs.

We decided to make this wine as a nod to tradition but in a more fresh and modern style. We chose to ferment it in amphora, called ‘Talhas’ in our region, as this is the traditional fermentation vessel of our region since the Romans were here over 2,000 years ago. But it only stays about 10 days on skins so it is quite juicy in style.

A question I like to ask at the end: what do you think is the future of wine?

Wine must come from vineyards that are farmed responsibly, at no cost to the environment and ideally with a positive impact on it. It is not an essential staple food and as such I believe that if we make wine in the future, it must be done with care. Wine needs to speak of place in order to be relevant, there must be a strong identity associated with it.

I think the time of huge volumes of mass-produced, “recipe” wines that taste like they could come from anywhere, is coming to an end. I believe that the future of wine is well farmed and with a strong sense of place.