THE BUYER | Austria’s Lenz Moser & Portugal’s Pedro Ribeiro unite through Arinto By Richard Siddle

Ribeiro & Moser is the latest project from the always innovative Lenz Moser and Portugal’s Pedro Ribeiro that hopes to widen the appeal and awareness of Portugal’s Arinto white grape variety.

Can you tell us about this new partnership you have established?

I met Pedro Ribeiro through a mutual friend, Claudio Martins. We spoke about Portuguese wines as I am always interested to find out the latest from a different country. I am familiar with Portuguese reds a bit, but had never heard of, or tasted, Arinto before and immediately liked what I saw. So we decided to tackle Arinto and bring this unknown wine to international markets – particularly as 90% of Portuguese exports are for its red wines. We have formed a partnership – Ribeiro & Moser – and will share profits from our jointly owned label of R&M.

Why were you so keen to work together?

Pedro knows how passionate I am about white wines – like with my Grüner projects – and thought I would be interested in what Portugal has to offer and Arinto in particular. I, on the other hand, have been impressed by Pedro’s operation at Herdade do Rocim in Alentejo. His philosophy of making wine in the vineyards and not in the cellar and his willingness to play with new ideas and blending for the best result. Rocim is an impressive place – the winery is partly insulated with 1m thick clay walls for fighting the gruelling summer heat of up to 40 degrees Celsius.

I was also fascinated by Pedro’s expertise in amphora winemaking and although we are not using amphora in the new project it has been really interesting to find more about that side of his winemaking.

The idea of your joint project came together over a few bottles of great wines from Rocim which we enjoyed during our first meeting together. It is always the same: it happens in the first few seconds whether you “click” or not – then you just try to overcome any cognitive dissonance and make it happen. But I must admit I had no intention of doing a project in Portugal up to that moment – but the opportunity to work with Pedro was too good to miss.

It’s very exciting to now have our finished wine in the warehouse ready to be shipped and sampled and build on the interest we got at ProWein for the barrel samples we had there.