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;

As a very first impression so far, I would say that wines in general present a good dark ruby color, with fresh aroma, medium bodies with slightly short finish. Lets see how they develop during the next weeks/ months but the lack of concentration is a bit surprising. Well, maybe not that much unexpected if we have in mind that vines didn’t have enough water to finish the maturity of the grapes during September, mostly in the lower altitude areas. Of course there are exceptions to this lack of volume: those vines that produce very low yields, with small berries in which we can get and extract more tannins and structure. Time will tell us.

Oscar

The year hasn’t been amazing climate-wise and the fact that now we have rain is just complicating things a bit more. On the top of that, it is not only one night of showers, it shall be a full week of wet weather that threatens our plans for the wines of 2013.

So far, grapes are resisting but it will be a challenging test to see how many days can grapes handle of this humidity without braking the skin of the berry and it starts to get rot.

Oscar

As I am writing, on Tuesday noon, the weather, which has been clear and quite warm during the last weeks, is now a bit cloudy. Temperatures started to drop this last night and forecast brings rain for the next days. Unfortunately, it does not like we will have few showers, but a long period, with more than one day of rain.

In case the wind does not dry out the vines, grapes can stay in precarious conditions, which eventually can evolve to rot.

Well, but the good news is that the grapes that are now arriving look beautiful, and enjoyed a long and slow maturity, which is something that we always wish to have but not always happens. And who knows if we will be able to make a single quinta VIntage…

Oscar

The point now is to take the decision on when to start harvesting the grapes for Port. White grapes for still wines are almost all harvested all over the Douro. Red grapes for still wines start now to be harvested by those winemakers that look for freshness and elegance in wines (others that prefer more ripened and concentrated flavours are still waiting few more days).

And for Port, the potential alcohol level of the grapes (sugar found in the berries) is at this stage higher than last year, but the phenolic ripeness is not complete yet and few more days waiting shall help to improve the quality of the grapes.

Of course we can wait for the best time for harvesting because the weather has been clear and sunny. If it was forecast rain for the next days, more people would be harvesting and getting the grapes to the winery soon. But the weather is helping and therefore we will wait. We expect to start harvesting Monday next week, September 23rd, with a small team of pickers as there is no rush to get all quickly to the winery. Grapes are improving each day and we can still safe the 2013 harvest.

Oscar

Related articles

• Quinta do Vallado: Revisiting an Old Friend in the Douro Valley
• How and when to explore the Douro valley
• Wine Collectors Snap Up 2011 Port as ’63 Vintage Sold – Bloomberg

English: Image of dry winemaking yeast and yeast nutrients. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the key elements, if not the most important after the grape in the winemaking process, is the yeast. Why is yeast so important? Because despite its small size (around 0.003 mm), this microorganism has the very important task of transforming fructose into ethanol, the form of alcohol present in wine. Yeast is present in the surface of the grapes and in the vines. Once the grapes are crushed, yeast starts its mission: it immediately begins transforming the sugar of grape into alcohol. Broadly speaking, it can tolerate temperatures between 10 ºC and 35 ºC; higher the temperature, the quicker yeast works and reproduces itself.

But are all yeasts the same? No. Different vineyards within the same country or region have different yeasts. And which are the best? Probably there is no answer to that question as it depends on the kind of aroma and taste the winemaker prefers. Once grapes arrive to the winery, the winemaker has two options: rely on the native yeasts that have been adapted to the local terroir or add a selected yeast, that is very likely brought from another wine region, possibly in another country, and was developed in laboratory to drive the fermentation into a certain kind of flavours and tastes.

In the Douro we have two realities, depending if we are talking about Port or still wine. From what I see, I would say that most of the Port is made with native yeast. On the other hand, for the Douro wines, a generous number of producers use selected yeast. The fact that, within the same region, this is the Douro, for a kind of wine we usually use native yeast and for other seldom, is curious, but not difficult to explain. Port is a worldwide reference, it is copied, imitated and even faked in several and respected wine regions in the world. But looks like no other place but the Douro can make something as fantastic as Port. And besides grape quality and winemakers’ skills developed through centuries, yeast plays a very important role. Thus, Port winemakers trust that the best yeast they can use is in the Douro vineyards.

Active dried yeast, a granulated form in which yeast is commercially sold. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And why using selected yeast in the still wines? It’s like buying an insurance, you know that if all goes right the insurance is not necessary, but if it goes wrong, insurance guarantees you don’t lose everything. In our case, as I guess you want to know, we use native yeast for all our Quevedo Ports except the Quevedo Rose. And for the Douro wines, we do sometimes buy an insurance!

In the future I think very commercial wines will continue to use selected yeast. But as yeast research develops, the number of selected yeast available will rise and more wine regions will use their own lab selected native yeast.

Is there any question about winemaking that you have been keeping for sometime and want to make now?

Oscar

What makes Port Port when compared with the regular wine is the spirit we add during the fermentation. The first half of the fermentation, this is, the convertion of the sugar of the grape into alcohol, is similar to wine. What really changes is when half of the sugar is transformed into alcohol. At this point, for each four liters of must we add around one liter of 77% abv spirit, made from distilled wine. When this is happening, we still have around 7% of potential alcohol unfermented. And unfermented it will stay as the yeast that is eating the sugar of the must and transforming it into alcohol dies. Once the spirit is combined,  the alcohol level rises to around 19% and at this point yeast can’t survive. Quick note to remind you that when we talk about sugar, we are referring to the natural sugar of the grape, known as fructose. Contritely to other wine regions with cooler temperatures and consequently lower sugar levels, in the Douro no sugar is added to the must as our grapes have plenty of sweetness and ripeness. Later, during aging in pipes or tanks, some alcohol adjustments may be necessary, but most of the time these corrections won’t be higher than 1 percentage point.

Currently, some research is being conducted to check whether using stronger wine spirit to fortify the must (+90% instead of 77%) would have similar effects on Port quality. To reach spirit with 77% abv the starting level is near by 100% and then water is added to dilute the spirit. So, is this water really necessary to dilute the spirit?

Let me know your questions and comments.

Happy New Year!

Oscar