Lancers White 2021

The visit of Henry Behar, an American of Armenian origin, to José Maria da Fonseca, even before the end of the war, and his proposal to launch a rosé wine in the United States, marked the major turning point in the company's business from 1944 onwards. Vintage Wines, which Henry Behar created with three other partners and later sold to Heublein, quickly covered the North American market, reaching sales of nearly half a million cases of Lancers by the mid-1960s and one million cases by the late 1970s. From the agreement signed between António Porto Soares Franco and Henry Behar, Lancers came to present a unique and distinctive image, with the bottle still being an object of cult in the United States today. It identified a pleasant, unpretentious product, with an easily readable name, adapted from the painting "Las Lanzas" by the Spanish painter Velasquez, whom Behar openly admired, versatile with any type of food, and within reach of the new generations of North American consumers, thus presenting all the essential requirements for the mass consumption of the product. Nowadays, Lancers continues to be a success case-study, given its international profile, being one of the best-selling Portuguese wines worldwide.