Now the challenge: with which music would you pair the Vintage 2007?

Cheers,

Pedro

I made a video showing my experience and I also asked Rodolfo Tristão, Coffee Sommelier of Nespresso presenting live this idea. Take a look and leave your comments!

Oscar

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nespresso CitiZ For Your Coffee Needs (ubergizmo.com)

Honestly I don’t really know how are the Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Sousão, Tinto Cão and Tinta Roriz Ports aging. They are already in 250 liters barrels and after Christmas we will make the first tasting. Any volunteers to help us? Meanwhile, I asked  my friends to share with us what they expect from the Port they helped to make. Here are some comments of the different teams:

Elisabete Pereira from Sousão team:

The whole experience was great. In other years, we were only able to see the beginning of the harvest, but this year we saw the complete process from the cleaning of the boxes for the harvest to the manual crushing of the grapes. Now we really know what it takes to create a wonderful Quevedo Port from excellent grapes, collected carefully by four women and made only from Sousão grapes. Now it only needs many years of rest to get a unique taste. The Sousão team really recommends the experience to anyone willing to spend a nice, relaxing, and different weekend!!

Marta Palmeira from Touriga Franca team:

632 kg of grapes will result in the best Port wine made from Touriga Franca in recent years. The fermentation time was the best of the five single-varietal. The brandy also helped. But the real flavour will come from the work of six busy hands not used to this work, and the slow and tired pace of the legs and feet of Dani, António, pequena Sara and myself. Next year we will taste it. And we’ll enjoy it for sure! Cheers

Diana, Ervilha, Manjas e Pedro from Tinta Roriz team:

Tinta Roriz, seven lines and a half
The grapes of Tinta Roriz were harvested by three and a half people, as one of us brought a baby in the womb. Maybe with this in his mind, Oscar gave us a varietal with huge bunches, plenty of taste, which we filled up in not even one hour; after that we helped Sousão and Touriga Franca teams, which were debating with lack of grapes and some laziness.

When we arrived at the winery, after lunch, we cleared the boxes and moved the grapes to the machine that takes the stem out, after that we put the must in a container which we filled up up to the knees level. In the meantime we went for the traditional dive in the Douro river and we came back after dinner to tread the grapes few hours before we had harvested. Within one year we will make a toast!

However, and there is always a “but” in everything, the success achieved by our ancestrors in the creation of a distinctive wine, attracted others to replicate the original. Almost every new world wine countries have it own version of Port: Argentina, South Africa, Australia or USA. I would not find any problem in this if they would create a new desgnition for their fortified wines. Call it Mendoza 20%, Stellenbosch Noble, Barossa Fortified or Napa Sweet, but not Port. Port is only made in sqm in the Douro wine region of Portugal.

The US have already started legislating against the use of European protected wine-related designations, forbidding the use of the word “Port” in theirs fortified wines. But a lot of political and legal work is still required in other countries.

I hope to find only one type of Port next time I go to Hong Kong, the one from Douro.

Oscar

Related articles by Zemanta

• Does Anybody Drink Port Anymore? (thepour.blogs.nytimes.com)
• How To Choose Dessert Wines (howcast.com)
• A Toast to South African Wine: Place of The Year 2009 (oup.com)

Dear readers of our blog, we have come up with a new idea. Something about wine, of course. We wanted to create a new wine, more informal and modern that the wines that we have at Quevedo. Something easy-drinking and fruity, probably not traditional and responsible enough to have it under a Quevedo brand. Its name is Oscar and the first vintage is the 2008.

Take a look at the video to check the label and visit Oscar’s blog.

Oscar

Yesterday Quevedo attended a tasting of Vintage Port 2007 for the Portuguese press and trade in the Palácio da Bolsa, in Porto. The tasting, organized  by the IVDP, by the Porto Wine Producers Association and by Essência do Vinho, got together around 50 producers only for tasting their Vintage Ports 2007.

I had already tasted some of these Vintages but yesterday I had a broader view of what the year was for the other producers. I got surprised by the consistency among almost all of them. Some lovely wines. Different styles of winemaking are pretty evident but the quality is generally high. Very high. And I am glad for that. It is good for Quevedo, it is good for the producers and it is good for the consumers. It is a positive-sum game and we should all be happy and proud of these wines.

Check the video and you will see what were my preferred Vintages. Oh, and my teeth are already back to its natural white color!

Oscar

All the grapes were harvested last Saturday, September 26th by my friends from the University in Quinta da Trovisca. Each year, they come over to help us on multiple tasks. This year we decided to make something different and they were amazing taking this project over and without them it would have been quite difficult to succeed.

How did it work? We created five different groups,: Touriga Nacional, Tinto Cão, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz and Sousão. Each group with 3 or four participants, responsible for the harvest, crush and tread of the grapes.

Now the fermentation of all the varietals has already been stopped. The musts are fortified and by tomorrow we should move it to 250 litters barrels, where they will age for a few years (we don’t know exactly for how much). Probably they will be bottled.

We started this idea for fun and to develop and enrich the community’s knowledge about Port. So if you are hanging out around, stop by us and we will show you this experiment.

Oscar

When I was in Sammamish, Seattle, I was lucky enough to visit the private cellar of Roy Hersh. While I was contemplating some big Port Wine treasures, I asked Roy to share with us his opinion about the 2007 Vintage Port declaration. At the very end of the interview, the memory stick ran out of space, right when he was about to answer which bottle he stands out of all his collection.

Take a look at the video, but if you want to know the answer to the final question, drop him a line!

Oscar

A couple of weeks ago I was in Seattle. There were some good excuses to visit Roy Hersh:

1. to check if the weather in Seattle is so gray as people say?

2. does Roy have any other bottle in his private cellar besides Port Wine?

3. is Boeing developing a seaplane specially adapted to the hills of the Douro?

All that, besides the possibility of spending some time with Roy, was more than enough to make me go.

I had an incredible time, but the pinnacle of the trip was the Port Wine tasting on the day before my departure. We were celebrating the 4th anniversary of the For the Love of Port. BTW, congratulations team! Members of the forum or simply Port Wine lovers, we were there to share, taste and enjoy some GREAT Ports. Here is the list:

• Warre Colheita 1937
• Niepoort Colheita 1963
• Rocha Colheita 1966
• Quevedo Colheita 1968
• Warre Vintage 1963
• Dow Vintage 1966
• Quinta do Noval Nacional 1967
• Croft Vintage 1963

My prefarded Port of the evening was the Warre Colheita 1937, very elegant and balanced, slightly creamy and with an astonishing bright color. I want to go back to Seattle. I have to!

More photos here!

Oscar