Fator XPTO: Passionate about the world of wine and the nature that surrounds it!

Luís Pedro Cândido da Silva: The first harvest was in 2003 at Quinta da Brunheda, in Tua, I was 15 years old and I was left by my Father without previous notice, almost as a punishment. A few days later he came back, intending to pick me up, but I didn’t want to leave, and I remember thinking “Fuck, if this is work, I want to do this forever!”.

10 years later, in 2013, I did my first internship in the Douro, at Niepoort’s Quinta de Naples, after having completed my master’s degree in oenology in Tarragona. This harvest made me realize the importance of traveling and working with different people, different philosophies, and deformatting the mind after the University years. And so it was: I started with an internship in New Zealand, in 2014, and then, with mandatory passages through Portugal in between, I went to Champagne, Mosel, South Africa and the United States, until at the end of 2015 I took charge of Quinta da Carolina, owned by my family, with 2 hectares of old vineyards and 2 hectares of olive groves.

We have been working in the vineyard and olive grove in organic production mode since 2016, and since 2019 we have been applying some of the biodynamic knowledge in the vineyard. The responsibility of continuing an existing project since 1999 and not trying to change it drastically made me create my own brands. In 2016 Primata, in 2017 Xisto Amarelo, El3mento (in partnership with Carmelo Santana) and Rabi (in partnership with Daniel Niepoort). Later, in 2019, Xis. All wines come from different plots and because of that, they have very different characters. They are a reflection of the way I think wines should be made, without fundamentalism, with a solid foundation in the trust of the winegrowers I work with, preserving nature and minimalism inside the cellar.