Strong projects are born from leaders’ strategic vision.  Manuel Bio, manager and entrepreneur, with roots in the left bank of river Guadiana, saw opportunities in the cooperative Adega Granja Amareleja where others were seeing a certain bankruptcy. His father was member of the cooperative. This motivated his interest in the situation of the cooperative. As a good son of the region, he decided to help. In 2007, Manuel took the leadership of the cooperative. In a few years, he restored the cooperative’s credibility and regained the collaboration of most of its previous members. And this was the starting point for a project now called Abegoaria. The strategic and commercial vision of Manuel Bio and the continuous search for production solutions to fuel the business, lead him to develop new projects, first in Alentejo, then in Douro, Lisboa, Tejo, Dão and Vinho Verde wine regions, and now as well in Algarve, Beira Interior and Azores. Today, Abegoaria is a wine business with projects also in olive oil, cheese, ham and sausages and enotourism, with strong national footprint and increasingly becoming a major player in wine exports.

António Ventura is our chief winemaker at Adega de Alijó. He is one of the big names of Portuguese oenology. António has a degree in agronomy, a specialization in oenology in Germany, a degree in applied sciences in winemaking from the Charles Sturt University in Australia and a postgraduate degree in oenology by the Biotechnology Graduate School (UCP).

With 40 years old of career in winemaking, António Ventura was elected the Personality of the Year by the leading wine magazine in the country.

António Braga is well-known for its career within Sogrape group, where he led the winemaking of some the prestigious Portuguese wine brands, besides having worked with CAR in Douro. Internationally, he developed his career in California, Argentina, Chile and New Zealand.

He is reputed as an unconventional winemaker, with training in Enology and Viticulture and an MBA, which gives him a strategic business and marketing vision. In Abegoaria he develops the fine wines category, being presently responsible for the Herdade do Gamito wines.

At the age of 12 wanted already to be a winemaker, as the result of having been born in a winemaker’s family. Trained in Enology and Viticulture by ISA, with a post-graduation in enology by UCP, he started his career as winemaker in 1999. Today, he works as a consultant and has built a partnership with Abegoaria for the launch of the new fine wines from Azores – Eruptio wines.

Luis Bourbon is the head of winemaking at Herdade da Madeira Velha, a reference in the wines of Évoramonte.