Europe's ghost vineyard, on the dunes beside Cabo da Roca, the continent's westernmost point. Phylloxera cannot live in pure sand, so the vines of Colares were never grafted: growers dig trenches down to the buried Cretaceous clay, plant the vine there, and train it low along the ground behind reed windbreaks against the Atlantic gales.
The vineyard once mattered — some 1,800 hectares in 1930 — but Sintra's suburbs have squeezed it to roughly twenty, making ramisco one of the rarest fine-wine grapes in the world. The adega regional, the cooperative founded in 1931, and a few stubborn growers keep the tradition alive, pressing tannic, salt-etched reds that need decades and taste like nowhere else.