Art Meets Wine at Portugal's Kopke Hotel

Owned and operated by Spain’s Escotet Family Estate, the Kopke is brimming with samples from their collection, as well as replicas of priceless artworks from the Escotet Family Estates Collection, one of the most prestigious in Spain. Some works within it are four pieces– Red Octopus, Eagle and Fish, and two Untitled– by Alexander Calder, as well as Grade écaillére and Guierrriére de cent ans by Joan Miro, five untitled works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a sculpture by Fernando Botero called Rapto de Europa, a bronze variation of the Phoenician Princess reclining on the back of her bovine captor. 

“They have around seventy pieces in the hotel,” says Fernando Filgueiras about artwork mainly drawn from the Escotet Family Estate. Coordinator of the ABANCA Art Collection and Sustainability at Afundación, he oversees the collection. “The pieces from the Abanca collection, three or four original pieces, are sculptures. The paintings from the Abanca collection are reproductions." Those include works by Picasso, Dalí, Braque, Léger, Barceló, and Chagall.

The collection is cobbled together from shows and galleries, and sometimes one-to-one private transactions, by Juan Carlos Escotet, CEO and majority shareholder of Abanca, Spain’s seventh largest bank. Acquisitions are made based on where and how they might fit into the ambience of the hotel, both generally and with specific spaces in mind. 

While comprising European, North and South American artists, the collection further encompasses practitioners from the Iberian Peninsula. These artists include Joana Vasconcelos, Manolo Valdés, Xavier Mascaró, and Vhils, a popular Portuguese street artist who works in bas-relief and ceramic tile, which ties him to one of the country’s long esthetic traditions. 

The collection’s three works by Vhils (aka Alexandre Farto) include Refract Series #01, Overexposure Series #03, and Cerámica Series #1, a portrait composed of blue and white tiles that sits in the hotel’s courtyard by the entrance. Like Manuela Pimentel’s Permissa, a riotous, colorful abstraction, it also employs ceramic tiles. Joana Vasconcelos’ sculptures of a frog and a bull incorporate crochet, a medium common to the Azores. Spanish artist Juan Garaizabal created his wood and steel wine glass sculpture, Ever time Port, on commission for the hotel grounds. “It reminds us of the glass we use to drink wine, here in Porto,” notes Filgueiras. 

Owned by Sogevinus Fine Wines since 2006, the label’s recent Kopke Group takeover forms an umbrella that covers wine brands Barros, Burmester, Calém, São Luiz, Quinta da Boavista, Velhotes, and the world’s oldest Port wine house, Kopke. The Kopke Group portfolio produces roughly 9.5 million bottles annually, exporting to over 60 countries. It owns and manages over 1,000 acres in the Douro Valley, roughly 600 of which occupy the world’s oldest wine region. 

The Abanca collection is a vital player in the Spanish art scene, loaning works to shows like the Thyssen Bournemisza Museum’s 2018 Dalí and Surrealism, as well as their Picasso and Cubism show of 2015. Both the Museum of Fine Arts in Oviedo and the Museum of León have shown works from the collection, and so has Afundación, in its Lugrís Dream Walls show of 2017 and its Space and Time show, earlier this year. 

Born in Madrid, in 1959, Escotet began his career in Venezuela, rising to the office of executive for Sociedad Financiera Latinoamericana. In the 1990s, he took advantage of the country’s financial and banking crisis, buying several institutions and eventually founding Banesco, Venezuela’s largest private financial institution. In 2015, he acquired Spain-based NCG Banco, now known as Abanca.

“The Escotet Family Estates’ primary motivation for assembling this collection was their family's passion and enthusiasm for art,” notes Filgueiras. “They are guided by a search for meaning in artistic expression and the ambition to create a public and accessible display for the enjoyment of the general public and, more specifically, all hotel visitors.”