Planting on a sandy cliff-top in Portugal's Colares region

Planting a vineyard is a long-term venture. Or perhaps I should say adventure. A massive investment and no return for at least three years and possibly a lot longer, and, like all farming, even more precarious in a period of climate extremes and unpredictability.

Nowhere more so than in Colares on the Atlantic coast of Portugal about 40 km (25 miles) north-west of Lisbon, shown on this World Atlas of Wine map of Lisbon and the Setúbal Peninsula. As Simon Woolf and Ryan Opaz point...