How does it works? Bloggers or those who want, create prizes and announce it in their blogs and also list in the organizers site, such as Vinography; those who want can buy virtual tickets to spend in specific prizes; in the end will be done a big drawing, some of those who buy the riffles wine the prizes and receive it at their homes while the money is sent to the farming community children in Lesotho get nutritious school lunches.

The prize that Quevedo will create is a Port Wine Starter Kit. Specially and exclusively conceived for the 5th edition of the Menu for Hope, this kit truly wants to mark your first contact with Quevedo Port Wine. And we will not get upset if you use it with other Port Wine bottles not from Quevedo! Not at all, you just have to enjoy it! This prize has the code WB17 and is composed by:

- Port Wine Tongs

- Port Wine Filter

- Port Wine Decanter

- 2 Official Port Wine Tasting Glasses

- Dark Chocolate

- since we can have some difficulties in shipping wine, but as we want you to unveil this kit with a bottle of Quevedo Port, we decided to included a coupon that is worth a bottle of our 2005 Vintage that you can change by in closest wine shop with our wine available;

Donation Instructions:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from the Menu for Hope at Vinography.

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope5 and make a donation.

3. Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.

For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for WB01 and 3 tickets for WB02. Please write 2xEU01, 3xEU02. Our Port Wine Starter Kit has the code WB17.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win.  Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Good luck!

Oscar Quevedo

The 9th of December was a different day for Quevedo, and a little bit special! During the Christmas networking meetup of the group London Bloggers, took place a wine tasting from winery bloggers for bloggers. These bloggers are from different industries, such as marketing, IT, events, photography, travel, etc. The wineries with wines for tasting were: Dinastia Vivanco, La Casa de las Vides, Fernando de Castilla and Sta. Quitéria (Spain); Weingut Clauer (Germany); Poggio Argentiera (Italy); Cortes de Cima and Quevedo (Portugal).

All this wine tasting was masterly organized by Robert McIntoch, from Wine Conversation. Quevedo was just represent by its wine, the Porto Quevedo Reserve Ruby. No one of us could attend to this meeting, though we would loved to have been there. Please check our Press Release, for more information about the tasting.

Ah, and this is the video we prepared for the tasting, made in Quinta Vale D’Agodinho, the main vineyard from Quevedo, while we were pruning the vines.

Oscar Quevedo

During this weekend, between 22nd and 23rd of November, Quevedo has been attending to the Porto & Douro Wine Show, in Lisbon, Portugal. The event is full of small and medium producers of Port and Douro wine. However, I must confess I was expecting some more sounding names. But they preferred to stay at home. Maybe they fell they do not need to come and they do not need this event.

Other thing that surprised me was the low number of Port producers. Now it seems everybody in Douro make table wine and just very few make Port. Nobody wants to start making Port at this time.

During the Saturday we received the visit of some wine lovers with presence in internet: Francisco Brito from FB Port Wine Blog, Ema and Nuno from Magna Casta, Andrea from Catavino and André Ribeirinho and Emidio from Adegga. On Sunday we received the visit of João Pedro Carvalho from Copo de 3, Pingus Vinicus from Pingas no Copo and Rui from Vinho a Copo.

At the same time of the wine tasting there are also a gourmet food tasting where some of the most prestigious restaurants from Lisbon, such as Eleven, Terreiro do Paço and Quinta dos Frades show their new food combinations; a couple of big pasta producers present their new pizzas and new breads. So it is not just about drinking wine is also to eat some good food!! Interesting, no?!?

During the show took place a very interesting Port Wine tasting to compare aged tawnies with Colheitas of the same age, this is: comparing 10 Years Tawny with Colheita 1998; 20 Years Tawny with Colheita 1988; until the 40 Years Tawny and Colheita 1968. Engº Bento Amaral, Head of the Tasting Chamber of the Douro and Port Wine Institute, magisterially led this tasting.

We enjoyed and also met new people!

Oscar Quevedo

I think this will be a great opportunity to meet again with the wine lovers from Lisbon, to meet some wine bloggers, mainly Portuguese and definitively, to taste and evaluate the most recent launches from Douro wineries!

So if you are reading this and you have not yet your week-end program complete, please come to Convento do Beato to meet Quevedo and to taste our and other wines from Douro. It is a very good opportunity and you must participate.

We will come with some news during the event.

Hope to see you there!

Oscar Quevedo

These days in Belgium were really fruitful; we had opportunity to provide our wine for a tasting but also to taste several wines. Some of these tasting notes can be found in Adegga. I could learn more about the strong and full-bodied Kaapzicht wines from South Africa, about the extraordinary flavor of the Daniel-Etienne Defaix wines from Chablis or the elegant Chateau La Fleur de Graves from Graves de Vayres, just mentioning some.

I must confess that this tasting would have been much better with the presence of some bloggers. Wine or food blogger of Brussels or even from all Belgium, next year we have to be more active, you have to come to this tasting, where you can find over 100 wines from 7 different countries. Well, indeed we could go further and we could organize a bloggers dinner on Saturday evening. Leave your comments and we will try to put this idea up!

Oscar Quevedo

Roger & Luc De Smedt wine shop, Belgium

These days Quevedo head up north in Brussels, Belgium, doing some wine tasting with our clients and with the clients of our clients. The tasting will end tomorrow, the November 11th. If you are close to Brussels and if you want to taste our Port Wine, our Douro Wine or even any other wine from the producers present at the tasting (see the list underneath), just email me and I can try to get an invitation for you.

As far as I hear from the client here in the tasting, French wines still having the majority share in the Belgium’s’ private cellars. Nevertheless, wines from Spain, like DO Cava, from South Africa and from Portugal are getting more and more demand from those who look for new experiences and new tasting.

We are offering for tasting two Douro wines (Vinho Cão 2002 and Quinta Vale D’Agodinho 2003) and five Port Wines (Porto Rita’s Tawny, Porto Quevedo White, 10 Years Old, LBV 2000 and Vintage 2005). While the Douro wine is almost always a surprise as people here did not ever had tasted a Portuguese not fortified wine, the Port Wine is easily a success. The Belgium love Port (Belgium is the fifth market in value and volume) and there are a lot of Port enthusiasts. They know the different categories of Port, some emblematic brands and they are aware of the good harvests. This makes me really happy. I feel that all the hard work we have during the year to get a good wine is then carefully evaluated and analyzed by people that love wine. And this passion for wine is the principle of a small and familiar winery such us Quevedo!

Óscar Quevedo

Wine producers also represented in the wine tasting:

France

Mr Vigier, Chateau Les Chaumes, Chateau Reve, Pomerol

Mr Jean Luc Alla, Chateau de St Pey Gran Cru St Emilion

Mr Yves Glottin, Chateau Goudichaud, Chateau La Fleur des Graves, Graves de Vayres

Mr Francois de Coninck, Chateau Junayme, Chateau Canon, Fronsac

Mr Henri Brut, Clocher Notre Dame de Marceille, Clocher de Rouffiac, Limoux

Mr Gilles Bousquet, Domaine St Antoine, Minervois

Mlle Pedrol, Chateau Les Pins Cotes de Roussillon, Rivesaltes, Cotes de Roussillon

Mr Jerome Jelonch, Le Faite de St Mont, Plaimont

Domaine Edmond Rentz, Alsace

Domaine du Vieux Chateau, Daniel-Etienne Defaix, Chablis

Other countries

Ms Yngvild Steytler, Kaapzicht, Steytler, Stellenbosch, South Africa

Mr Erik Scheerlinck, Tsinandali, Saparavi Marani, Mukuzani from Georgia, Tamaioasa from Romania, Enira from Bulgaria

Mr Pedro Azcunaga, Azcunaga, Mont Michel, Navarra and Cava, Spain

Home & Passion Restaurant

These days we are traveling in Belgium to do some wine tasting with our clients. Once a year, one of our clients, Roger & Luc De Smedt, a distributor located in Brussels, invites his clients for a wine tasting in a restaurant or a wine shop with the producers he represent and then finally at his shop.

We are here for four days, from Saturday November 8th to Tuesday, November 11th. Today we are in the Home & Passion restaurant, a French traditional cuisine restaurant, where the Italian Chef Pino, from Sicilia, leads the kitchen. We were four producers: Alain Vigier from Bordeaux, France, Daniel-Etienne Defaix from Chablis France, Kaapzicht from Stellenbosch, South Africa and us, Quevedo from Douro, Portugal.

At around 7pm we had dinner at the Home & Passion and after we went to a decoration shop also for showing our wines to the people that were visiting the shop and buying decoration stuff for Christmas.

Quevedo Wines

And as there is no Christmas without Port Wine, 7 weeks before Christmas is probably the right moment to think about which Port to choose. And why the tasting at the decoration shop? Well, a bottle could also be seen as a decoration piece while the wine is in its ageing process!! Or maybe the right reason is that Luc is friend of the decoration shop owner!

It has been a fruitfulness experience and I hope to come back to you once again during these days.

Óscar Quevedo

a Baixa do Porto

The Miguel Bombarda Street, in the center of city of Porto, is known by its high concentration of art galleries. Gradually, during last decade, houses and old shops were remodeled into areas dedicated to the art. But just lately some effort has been put in the promotion and  advertising of this space. A sign of those changes comes by the hand of the City Hall, allocating the reconstruction of the street. The works have already begun, including the transformation of part of the street into a pedestrian crossing.

Some new exhibitions  have been inaugurated and in order to increase their impact on the public, all the galleries organized and synchronized their exhibitions calendars, which they change every two months. It has been such a great success that these exhibitions are standing out in the daily culture of the city. There are new shows, street activities, all surrounded by a nice and fun atmosphere. To support the promotion of these activities, there are two sponsors: Porto Lazer and the whisky producer The Famous Grouse, associating their brands with the most cosmopolitan side of the city.

Wouldn’t this be an excellent opportunity to promote the Port Wine in the city which has its name? At least because Miguel Bombarda Street is very close from the Solar do Vinho do Porto and also from the Museu do Vinho do Porto. Indeed, considering all the impact that these exhibitions  have on tourists and on young adults of the city, potential Port Wine consumers, this would be an excellent opportunity to promote the wines between them.

I think it would make sense that the Instituto do Vinho do Douro e Porto supported these street activities, where the relationship between the consumer and the Port could be enhanced. Port Wine would be associated to the art, nice moments, young people and tourists.

I hope soon Porto, city and spirit, find each other again for a perfect port and art pairing.

Bruno Pinto

This year, the ritual started the 6th of September in the middle of the Praça da República, the center of S. João da Pesqueira, with a crowd of over 400 people and 16 bottles of Port.

The first wine to be auctioned was a Colheita 1989 from Adega Cooperativa de S. João da Pesqueira, the cooperative winery the city which represents the small grape growers of the biggest Port Wine district. At the end of the 80’s, and beginning of the 90’s, this winery brought to the market some excellent wines, mainly Douro table wines like the Reserva 1985 or the Reserva 1989, which my father still has in his cellar. Unfortunately, lately it’s been loosing influence and prestige in the Douro wine business.

The big part of the wines auctioned were made by small and independent producers of S. João da Pesqueira. There are some exceptions. One is the Quinta de Roriz, Vintage 1970 with a reserve price of 100 EUR and acquired by 145 EUR. Another outstanding wine was the Quinta do Cachão from Caves Messias, Colheita 1950, with a reserve price of 300 EUR and bought by 305 EUR.

The photo shows the table with all of the wines auctioned, the respective Reserve prices and the highest bids. I personally think that some of the wines were sold quite cheap, as can be expected in an auction in the middle of a wine region with very few participants not related with the port wine production. Unless a big advertisement campaign took place in the next years, this would be a really good place to buy quite cheap wine from small and little known producers.

The auction ended with a nice surprise. A Colheita 1898 from a small producer was auctioned, with the revenue reverting to the Geriatric Hospital of the town. At this very moment, it’s strange to know how influential Port has historically been for my town. I truly hope it never changes. The Reserve price was 520 EUR and the highest bid 1,000 EUR.

I had the opportunity to buy one bottle in this auction. Leave a comment and I will let you know which Port Wine I brought home!

Oscar Quevedo

Excruciating back pain and a smile in the face, that’s how we feel.

I’m too tired to tell you the full version of the story but I can give you de bottom line: Quevedo’s family knows how to receive their friends, and know how to do some of the best wines in the region.

I’ll rest for half a century (like the finnest Port Wines) and then I will make a detailed report of all the activities. For us was a funny adventure, to you just the birth of a magic Quevedo White Port.

João Sarmento