Ah, Colares! What memories! Practically a disappeared wine region now, as Otto mentions.
I remember visiting Azenhas do Mar 20 or 25 years ago and still seeing a few of those absolutely sandy vineyards (the 'rijo' was considered lower-quality), practically an extension of the stupendous Atlantic beaches.
If you look at a map of the Iberian Peninsula, this is where it seems to grow a nose, just west of Lisbon and north of the Tagus river estuary. Azenhas is contiguous to Sintra - Europe's most nostalgic and romantic resort, bar none. (Dangerous place, Seteis - it's been known to generate increases in birth rates.)
At Colares and Azenhas, the ramisco grapevines grew in and out of the sand - they were prepetuated, not by replanting, but simply in the old style, by digging a hole and forcing a shoot or branch of an existing vine (and still connected to it) into the ground, where it would take root. No phylloxera with all the sand, of course.
The ramisco produced a very Atlantic (natch...), very precise, unexpectedly refined and elegant wine. Saint-Estphe meets Vosne-Romane, or something. But that was a long time ago, before construction of weekend homes for rich Lisboners prectically obliterated the vineyards. I remember that already in the mid-1980s they told me that all the wine made by Chitas, the top Colares winery, was mostly made with grapes brought from elsewhere in Estremadura or Ribatejo... But I also remember a sensational bottle of the 1956 I enjoyed back then at Michel, a great (and long gone) French-Portuguese restaurant atop the So Jorge castle. How elegant the damn' thing was!
