Mark and Dorinda Winkelman are an American-Dutch couple who started visiting Evora in the early 1980s.   In 2000 they couldn’t refuse an offer made to them to buy an old Quinta in desperate need of saving. Dorinda says it this way: 

"This restoration project pushed me to see it was time to start planting my dream.  Start an organic farm, build a team to work together using organic and biodynamic  principles.   I hadn’t thought to do this in Portugal,  but the Best Things in Life happen to us when we are planning something else.  I have never looked back.”