We started out clueless too.
Clueless Wines is a Lisbon wine studio turned B2B outfit: we taste, we curate, and we get small producers in front of the people who actually write the wine lists. Three things, really. Tastings for anyone curious, wine lists for the bars that want one, and a way into Portugal for producers nobody has imported yet.
We are Alex and Nadia. We fell into wine through the Spanish regions, then settled in Lisbon and opened a tasting studio for people who were curious about wine and put off by the way it usually gets explained. A few years of tastings later, the same thing kept coming back at us from the other side of the table: the bars we drank in were pouring from the same short list, because the same few importers supply everyone.
What we go looking for has not changed since. Growers who let the place do the talking: old vines, patient work, a bottle that could not have come from anywhere else. Sometimes that is a natural wine and sometimes it is a family who has been doing the same unfashionable thing since 1958. We are not precious about categories. A wine either tastes of a place or it tastes of a trend, and that is the whole test.
Alex runs the tastings. Nadia runs the platform and everything around it. Rufete is our Portuguese Water Dog, named after one of our favourite grape varieties, which probably tells you the rest. He turns up at tastings, he has opinions about pairings, and on the trade side of this site he reads bars' wine lists: the first check is free.
