The Biscoitos Wine Cooperative reports a positive 2026 harvest, new wines, returning members and plans to enter the American market. But behind the optimism is a warning from its president, Cecílio Faustino: preserving the vineyards means preserving one of Terceira’s most distinctive landscapes and ways of life.
In Biscoitos, wine has never been simply something made from grapes. It is made from stone, salt, wind and persistence. Here, on the northern coast of Terceira, generations have cultivated vines in a landscape where agriculture appears almost to defy geography, patiently protecting plants against Atlantic weather and working parcels whose beauty conceals the physical demands of viticulture. The harvest therefore measures more than grapes. It measures whether an old relationship between people and land is still capable of passing from one generation to another.
For the Adega Cooperativa dos Biscoitos, this year has brought encouraging signs. Its president, Cecílio Faustino, describes the 2026 harvest positively, with approximately ten tonnes of white grapes received. Just as important for the cooperative’s future, he reports “a gradual return of members”—a modest phrase that carries considerable significance in a sector dependent upon people still willing to undertake the demanding work of maintaining vineyards throughout the year.
The cooperative is also renewing what it places in the bottle. Three new wines are part of its current development, with red and white Moledo wines already on the market. A 2025 Licoroso Tinto is expected to follow, together with the 2025 Magma and Muros de Magma, both bearing Denominação de Origem designation. Magma recently received national attention when Público described it as a Verdelho from Biscoitos demonstrating that Azorean wine “does not live by Pico alone.” It is an important distinction for an archipelago whose contemporary wine renaissance has become strongly associated with Pico, but whose viticultural memory and potential extend to other islands and terroirs.
Now Biscoitos is looking beyond the islands. Faustino says the cooperative is studying several new markets—some of which he prefers not yet to reveal—but one destination is already clear: “America is moving forward now.” For a Terceira wine, the American market carries a significance beyond commerce. It is also a market where generations of Azorean emigrants and their descendants have preserved an emotional familiarity with the foods, wines and landscapes of the islands. A bottle crossing the Atlantic can therefore become both an export and a form of cultural recognition.
Yet optimism does not erase the fragility of the vineyard. Faustino argues that viticulture remains the “poorest relative of agriculture” and calls for faster, continually updated support. His description of vineyard work is almost a definition of agricultural faith: “In the case of the vineyard, it is an entire year with your back turned to the weather and nothing falls, and when something does fall, the surplus serves to cover the expenses of years of bad luck.” Wine may acquire romance once it reaches the glass; the vineyard itself knows pruning, disease, wind, uncertainty, physical exhaustion and the possibility that twelve months of labor will depend upon a few decisive weeks of weather.
This is why Faustino’s strongest argument is ultimately not about sales. He describes the Biscoitos terroir and its methods of cultivation, treatment and harvest as unique, and calls for the protection of those who still possess “the courage” to love and work their vineyards. Their labor maintains not merely an agricultural product but a landscape—a parish increasingly recognized for its wine identity and a cultural inheritance that he hopes can be handed to children who will, in turn, defend it.
For that is what is really harvested in Biscoitos each autumn. Grapes, certainly. But also continuity.
Between black stone and Atlantic wind, every surviving vine says that someone remained, someone worked, someone believed another harvest would come. And if the bottles of Biscoitos now travel toward new markets, perhaps even toward America, they will carry something that cannot be measured in tonnes or euros.
They will carry a small piece of Terceira—grown stubbornly from stone.
Based on a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço, director. The photo is also from DI.