Periquita is older than most of the brand names a Portuguese wine drinker knows. Released as a bottled red in 1850 — at a time when Portuguese table wines moved in barrels — it was the country's first branded table wine. It is still being made, still by the same family company, still from the Castelão grape that almost nobody outside Portugal could name.
José Maria da Fonseca founded the company in 1834 and based it in Azeitão, on the Setúbal Peninsula south of Lisbon. By the middle of the century the cellars were modern enough to draw a royal commendation. Bottling rather than shipping in bulk was the bet that mattered. Barrels left the producer; labelled bottles stayed his. Periquita named its vineyard, claimed its grape, and built a brand a hundred years before most table wines in Europe bothered.
José Maria da Fonseca
That grape was — and is — Castelão. Setúbal's warm, sand-driven soils suit it: dark fruit, restrained tannin, a faint resin-and-spice note that signals the wine before the label does. Fonseca still farms Cova da Periquita, the parcel that gave the wine its name, and the portfolio has grown out around it — a Clássico, a Superyor, a long-aged Reserva — every one of them running through Castelão as its anchor.
Parallel to the table wines, Fonseca has spent the same century-and-three-quarters making Moscatel de Setúbal — a fortified white from one of Portugal's oldest aromatic grapes, aged in old wood. Periquita got the brand; Moscatel got the prestige. Today's highest critic scores in the cellar sit on the fortifieds, not on the namesake. Same village, same family, same bet that bottling and naming things would eventually pay.