For several reasons Sweden is a very special market for wine:

• State control of ALL retail alcohol sales of over 3.5% ABV
• high taxes on alcohol beverages
• restriction in the number of brands and types of wines listed on the shelves
• new launches of wine only if Systembolaget (Swedish wine retail monopoly) wants
• offers to the Systembolaget have to be submitted through a local importer
• different types of shops, some very small in which you have to ask a member of the staff to bring you the bottles you want
• any kind of discounts are forbidden
• all products have the same treatment, so the order of the wines on the shelves are random, in some places a wine can be on the top, while in others on the bottom;
• sales representatives from the importer/ winery are not allowed to talk to managers of Systembolaget shops

Well, these are the rules. It is not easy to get your wines there, only one wine for each category/ type is listed, for instance Douro Reserve or White Port. Actually, only this year, for the first time, we had one of our wines listed in the Swedish Systembolaget shops. There was a tender for listing Rose Port during the Summer. As winners of this tender, Quevedo Rose Port was the first Rose Port ever to be sold on the Swedish market. I was proud of that and couldn’t miss this chance to take a photo of our Port on the shelf. So before the end of the listing period (May- August) there I was, in a Systembolaget shope in Stockholm. I’m not sure if it is allowed to take photos of the stores. I didn’t dare to ask, but if in the next weeks you don’t see any photo here, it is because Systembolaget asked me to remove them.

Oscar

Are you ready for that? This offer is valid for 24 hours…. My email is oscar at quevedoportwine dot com

If you don’t live in the US, don’t be desperate, we will have more offers soon to other countries!

Oscar

We moved all the clean cases to another pallet and finally we found the case responsible for all this extra work. In the case there were 5 bottles in perfect conditions and one broken bottle, as expected. But surprisingly, the bottle was not broken in the bottom but by the shoulder. So the Port that was above the breaking ring spilled but the rest remained there and in contact with oxygen, a ball of fungus started developing the way you see it on the photo.

Broken bottles also teach us some lessons!

Oscar

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

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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

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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