Standing Fox did not start with a plan to make wine. It started with a place.
After decades of living and travelling across the world, tasting and collecting wine along the way, we began looking for something more permanent. We were not searching for a vineyard and we certainly were not planning to become winemakers. We simply wanted a place that felt right.
In 2019, that search brought us to Santa Cruz do Douro, in the municipality of Baião in northern Portugal.
What we found was beautiful, but not polished. Granite terraces disappeared beneath vegetation. Roads and drainage needed rebuilding. Forest had grown dense. Old agricultural buildings and ruins stood across the land. Vines, fruit trees and olive trees remained as evidence of a landscape that had been worked for generations.
What looked neglected did not feel empty. It felt unfinished.
We began by trying to understand what was already here: the old walls, the routes water had once followed, the terraces, the vines, the forest and the people who knew the land before us. But understanding quickly became work.
We repaired roads and granite terraces. We began restoring drainage, reservoirs and traditional water mines. We cleared the forest to reduce fire risk and started planting indigenous Portuguese trees to increase diversity. We tended the old olive trees and planted new groves. And we began looking beyond the boundaries of the property we had first bought.
We soon discovered that what appeared to be one landscape was, on paper, anything but.
Over generations, inheritance had divided the old Quinta into smaller and smaller holdings. As people moved from the countryside to towns and cities, many parcels became difficult to farm and were eventually abandoned.
Over the years that followed, we began bringing those pieces back together. One parcel, then another. Vineyard, forest, meadow, ruins, old paths and forgotten terraces. More than thirty separate parcels later, the puzzle is still not entirely complete.
Standing Fox has become as much an act of reassembly as creation: not making an estate from nothing, but gradually bringing an old landscape back together.
We did not know in 2019 that this would lead us to wine.
But the place had already begun changing the direction of our lives.
