The product of a climactically challenging year, the 2016 Vintage shows all the characteristics of a wine that could reach great age, whilst also providing drinking pleasure at any time in its maturation cycle.

The wine is a deep dark ruby with violet undertones, and the nose offers lush plum, grape and blueberry aromas supported by rich spice notes, a lovely combination of freshness and intensity. On the palate dense, powerful fruit and rich tannins are well balanced, robust and compact, just what you want for a classic Vintage Port.

At this point it seems every year is an “atypical” year for weather in the Douro, and 2016 gave us challenges different from 2015’s atypical pattern. The winter months were warmer than usual and January and February wetter by far than the historical averages. The spring months (March – May) were cooler than normal but also extremely rainy. Then came a hot dry summer, and a perfect warm and dry harvest period which began mid-late September, after a welcome light rainfall that gave the grapes that last bit of freshness before harvest.

The 2016 Vintage Port blend rather unusually includes grapes from Quinta das Mós. With over a kilometer of river frontage, this low, north-facing quinta is usually our driest and first to harvest, but it seems 2016’s unusual weather patterns suited it well and the grapes matured to Vintage greatness.

In Portugal it is traditional to have fish the evening of the 24^th – bacalhau, octopus or skate. We would recommend a white for these dishes, particularly Claudia’s White 2015. In fact, this wine would also be superb with the turkey which is typical of English and North American Christmas dinners. A finely balanced blend of five different Portuguese grapes, Claudia’s White 2015 has an elegant and complex aroma that will delight your senses with an intriguing blend of slightly smoky and bright citrus notes. On the palate it delivers a well-structured and complex flavour with great freshness and minerality.

If your holiday meals will feature richer meats, such as a roast goose, game, or a crown roast of beef, or the Portuguese cabrito (roasted goat) or a rich lombo assado (roasted loin of pork), then you will want a superb red, and we recommend Q Grand Reserve 2014. Made from a trio of classic Port grapes this wine is maturing beautifully in bottle. Rich dark fruit flavours dominate both nose and palate, with a whiff of spices and a chocolatey richness, and power that extends into a wonderful long finish.

Finally… what to drink with the dried fruit flavours of fruitcakes and mince pies, or the wonderful eggy sugary richness of Portuguese fried Christmas sweets such as rabanadas, filhoses or sonhos? Port, of course. But here, we would recommend the 30 Year Old White Port. The flavour is too complex to put into mere words, but Claudia, who blended this, noted “at a certain point, it smells like honeycomb.” The finish never seems to end. That said, the refreshing acidity is just what you want to cut through the richness of your desserts. Also, honestly, this Port can be enjoyed as a well-earned dessert in and of itself – you may not want any pudding.

Enjoy your holidays!

“Quevedo is a family wine business”. Yes, but lots of families make wine, after all.

At Quevedo, being a family wine business means so much more than the fact that a lot of family members are involved in the enterprise. There are many small stories and details of family history that have shaped the flavour of our wines and the basis of our business in ways that are not immediately obvious. Here are a few such instances:

Why are Quevedo Ports a bit drier than the average?

Once I asked my grandpa João Quevedo this question, and I never forgot his answer. He said that sugars hide flavours. Sugars work like makeup, hiding what is behind, both good and bad flavours. “If you believe in your grapes and in your Port”, he says, “why make the Port so sweet? Let the sugars of the grapes ferment a little bit longer, make your Ports a bit drier and you will have more expression of your fruit”.

The ups and downs of the family business

There are some events during the last century that had an indelible effect on the evolution of the family business. One of these happened to my great grandfather Raul, when a foreign merchant based in Vila Nova de Gaia, that had been buying the Port from my family, went bankrupt. The merchant left my family, and certainly other families as well, with no payment for the previous two vintages.

This major financial loss for our small business created a financial and emotional drama within the family, and my grandfather believes that this setback, so late in a life which had been spent fighting to raise the family business, strongly affected his father-in-law Raul. It is one of the reasons that as soon as laws permitted, in the 1980s, the Quevedo family decided to establish our own independent wine brand, and to produce and sell finished wines, rather than sell all our grapes or harvest wines to the big Port shippers.

Realizing that Mum doesn’t need to know everything

When people ask me when I started tasting Port, I don’t recall it very well. Maybe at the age of 4, 5 or 6 years old. What I do remember is going to my grandparents’ house, where my grandpa João would give me a freshly made cookie and share with me few drops of a Port that he would get from a barrel in the basement of his house. I would have only a sip or two, but that would be enough to make me smile and feel the sweet perfume of grapes.

However, for a reason that only now I understand, for several months, maybe even a few years, there was no sipping of Port when having the cookie at grandpa João’s house. And I believe that happened because I told my parents, during dinner, that grandpa João gives me a drop of Port when I have a cookie. After that day, when my Mum furiously looked at my father without saying a word, no more Port with cookies was served by grandpa.

Both the impression made by those first few sips, and then missing the treat for those few years after I told Mum, are part of what made me appreciate Port even more as I grew older, and drew me into the business as an adult.

To dispose of this young sediment, we wait until the solid particles are already at the bottom of the container and then decant the wine. Time and cold temperatures help to sink the particles to the bottom.

The question being, what do we do with the sediment that represents about 1.5%-2% of all wine? If we wait too long, it will continue to concentrate. But there is another option, sediment can be filtered by a machine.

In the video below, you can watch a rotating cylinder filtering out the sediment through a tight filter. On the surface of the cylinder, we put diatomaceous earth, a fantastic filtering agent. The wine, which we don’t see in the process, is clarified before returning to the tank. What comes out from the cylinder is a dense, rather dry, not toxic sediment that is later used for the spirits industry. This sediment we sell to distilleries as they can still use it to make spirit, through distillation. It can also be used to make tartaric acid.

But in case you want to have the same experience as the old English lady, drop us a line and we will keep a bit of sediment for you. Or better yet, come over to our winery and enjoy sediment with a glass of wine!

Cheers!

Oscar

Another bit of Trivia to put under your belt is that our main grapes have been ripening at different rates: while Touriga Franca is just now reaching its pinnacle ripeness, Tinta Roriz was jumping off the vines two weeks ago! Not only that, but Tinta Roriz is currently showing better color concentration, complexity and balanced flavors, when compared with Touriga Franca or Touriga Nacional. Hence why we believe that 2014 is going to be the year of the Tinta Roriz!

Currently, our white grapes, and red grapes from the river side (A and B grade), have been dutifully harvested, but there are still plenty of grapes to go! Our plan, sit back and relax! Because despite the vineyards being fabulous for mud wrestling, they’re for from ideal for harvesting. We need time for the vines to dry out, to obtain their intense concentration once again – nothing that a few days of sun shine couldn’t provide.

In the previous post, I may have mentioned that 2014 could be a vintage year, but no more! The rain killed what looked like a promising harvest, and the Baixo Corgo and even the Cima Corgo just can’t take it.

That said, we may not have a Vintage year, but there’ll still be plenty of wines that will benefit from the funky weather!

Oscar

Fortunately, we’ve been lucky this year! The temperatures during the day have hovered around +30ºC, while nights have been cool, with temperatures going below 15ºC and sometimes as far as 12ºC. The cool, brisk evening temperatures allow the vine to maintain higher levels of acidity in the berries which will promote longer aging in bottle.

If you rack your brain back to 2012, you’ll remember our “riveting” conversation about the important of humidity in the soil. When water levels are low, vines shift to survival mode, and essentially, quit helping the grapes. Fortunately, this is not the case this year! The water levels have been good, but could potentially use a few more buckets of water this August.

The only thing that didn’t help, as mentioned in a previous post, were the cold and humid days during fruit set, which reduced the number of fertilized flowers. Here is a table with values for the potential alcohol on August 10th of previous years and the day when we started harvesting:

• 2007 10.49%, September 19th
• 2009 11.86%, September 14th
• 2010 10.05%, September 18th
• 2011 12.07%, September 12th
• 2012 9.13%, September 28th
• 2013 10.9%, September 23rd
• 2014 11,2%, ?

We still have a long way until the harvest – five or six weeks yet – so many things can change. But at least we can report that 2014 is certainly better than 2012 and probably better than 2013. At this point, it’s just a matter of patience; which is difficult when it feels like the day before Christmas!

Oscar

• screw cap is easier to use than cork, avoiding the need of a cork screw to pull the cork out of the bottle;
• both screw cap and synthetic cork are trichloroanisole (TCA) free, while few decades ago cork had problems of TCA contamination (which above a certain level may spoil the wine)

Despite that, cork is still the most used closure. Why are wine producers so keen in using cork? I’ve recently visited Corticeira Amorim factory and tried to understand a bit more about the motivation for using cork. I’ve also read few article about which closures to use for wine and found some stunning research (check bibliography at the bottom of this article). Putting the environmental question apart (cork comes directly from the bark of the cork tree grown naturally), there are two factors that help cork to be the closure that ensures the best quality for a bottle of wine:

• all the oxygen that passes to the wine comes from within the cells of the cork, and not from the outside; thus cork stoppers are effective barriers to the transmission of exogenous aerial volatile compounds, while synthetic closures allow contamination and oxidation from outside.
• given their relatively high oxygen permeability, synthetic closures promote the wine’s development towards oxidation faster than the other closures. In contrast, reductive off-flavours have been reported to happen more frequently in wines sealed under screw cap, which is argued to be related to their low oxygen permeability compared with other closures.

Regarding to Port Wine, back in 2008 I knew of one Port producer, Castelinho, using not only natural cork. They were using synthetic corks is some of their references. Currently, don’t know any. However, legislation does not allow the use of screw cap but only natural and synthetic corks  (the only exception is the very small size bottle which can be sealed with screw cap). Though I’m sold to natural cork for Port, I disagree with the prohibition of using other closures. Producers should use what they think is better for their wines and Ports. Through experiments of different closures, we could see and taste how different closures perform in a bottle of Port. And eventually we might come to the conclusion of what closure is the most indicated for Port. But through our own experiencing, not by law.

Oscar

Bibliography – If you want to know more about these three closures I suggest you to read:

• Impact of different closures on intrinsic sensory wine quality and consumer preferences
• The impact of closure type and storage conditions on the composition, colour and flavour properties of a Riesling and a wooded Chardonnay wine during five years’ storage;
• Sealing effectiviness;

2013 was a great year for us, so we just hope that 2014 is as good.

Happy New 2014!

Oscar

Wine geeks like rituals. We care about which glasses to use, which way to pass the bottle, decanting time or serving temperatures. We take these “necessary” steps to fully enjoy a bottle of wine on any occasion. Another ritual that you may also care about is how to open the bottle and which cork screw to use. For very old bottles which might have a wet cork that may not come out in a single piece, port tongs can make the whole difference.

How to use Port tongs? Instead of pulling out the cork, we directly remove the top of the neck. The video above will show you how to do it but basically, the tongs are heated (I prefer to use ember rather than the stove), then clamp the tongs around the neck of the bottle right above the line of the bottom of cork for 30 seconds and then put a cold wet towel (I sunk the towel in an ice bucket) around the neck in the same place. If the tongs were really hot this temperature change will cause the glass to break. Voilà, you made it. Time to decant the wine and enjoy it with your company. If you didn’t make it, try again and make sure the port tongs are red-hot before clamping them to the bottle!

Cheers,

Oscar

Practical information that you may want to know: we have just finished to bottle what is the last batch of this first edition of 1996 Colheita (we made three bottlings between 2010 and 2013). The remaining volume we have, a bit more than 10.000 liters, will remain aging in oak pipes and in tonel for the next decades, before we touch it again and put it in bottle.

Cheers,

Oscar