Few days ago, Simon Fisher, a new friend I met online, asked me what is happening in the Douro, right now, before Christmas. I guess some of you may know, but many others have no clue. Am I wrong? So, this is my reply to Simon’s question:

Hi Simon, the Douro is pretty cold these days. Actually, it’s snowing now, for the first time this Fall. Vines are dormant and ready for pruning, while wines are naturally cleaning, as lower temperatures bring solid parts to the bottom of the barrels, so they will soon show bright and clean colors. What keep us busy now is the Christmas season. Everybody drinks Port for Christmas and some also use it for gifting.

Late last week my sister Claudia and I were tasting all our range White Ports, including the special Colheita aged in oak. It was fun! This week we will bottle our first blend of 20 Year Old Port.

I guess you have to come over and see our we spend our time. And maybe you can also help us giving us your opinion about our wines!!

Oscar

During the EWBC – European Wine Bloggers Conference in Vienna, Austria, we visited the Esterházy Museum. One of the most impressive pieces I saw, was a press device from the 1630. It’s around 5 meters long, all in wood, and with a pretty small compartment for crushing the grapes. Check the video and you will see what I am talking about.

Oscar

This photo is a good example of what we have been doing during the last days. After two weeks harvesting, we decided to take a brake so the grapes on the vines can finish the phenolic maturation. All our vineyards located in the bottom of the valley were already harvested. During the next week, should the weather help, we will start harvesting Quinta da Trovisca, located 550 meters above the sea level. After finishing the harvest in Trovisca, we shall move to Senhora do Rosário, located around our winery.

So, the question now is, what is on the photo? This is the moment of the fortification. We are adding a 77% alcohol by volume “brandy” to inhibit yeasts of transforming more sugar into alcohol. This way fermentation stops and we get a sightly sweet wine, Port Wine, also known in the Douro as Vinho Generoso.

Let me know if you have any question!

Oscar

This year has been marked by a rainy Winter, a hot Summer and by the high number of weddings I am attending to. One of those weddings was far away from the Douro. Mouna, the bride, is from Niger and Andreas, the groom, is Hungarian, who I met when I was working in Madrid.

Due to their wedding, Mouna and Andreas gave me one of the best cultural experiences of my life, which I will never forget. The wedding was in Niamey, the capital of Niger, a landlocked country located in Western Africa. This was my first time in Africa and I was very excited for that, a continent with such a vast history and culture, with so many different landscapes and one of the most intact continents of the world.

Very differently from the European weddings, which usually last for half a day, celebrations of this weeding lasted for three days and four nights. It started on Wednesday with a welcome dinner for all the family and friends of the bride and groom. After eating very tasty and sometimes spicy local food and drinking a red iced tea called bissap (which I loved and brought some with me to Portugal), we started pushing the groom to the pool. For big surprise of the locals, but as expect when you start playing these games, the night finished with the groom, one of our friends and me in the pool, with no time for undressing.

On the next day, Thursday, there was a big session to paint hands and feet of the ladies, which special emphases on the painting the bride would show when meeting the groom after the religious ceremony. On the other side, men had a more relaxed day, with plenty of time to swim and play in the pool.

On Friday was the religious ceremony. As this was a Muslim wedding, I was eager to see and know how all this would be. There were plenty of differencies, starting by the dressing code: everybody on local dresses. But beside that, as the bride’s mum is a Tuareg descent, all the young men, groom’s father included, were dressing the famous turban. The turban is used by the Tuareg for fending off the desert sand and protecting the head and face from very high temperatures and strong sunlight. We were far away from the desert but to preserve local culture, we were with a turban on. The religious ceremony itself, which lasted for around 30 minutes, counted with the participation of sultans from all around Niger. Surprisingly for me, neither the bride or the groom attended to it. The bride was at her parents house and the groom in another house of the family, both located in the street where the ceremony was happening. Also women were not allowed to participate, they were all at bride’s parents house, listing to the canticles through the loudspeakers installed under the tent where all men were. The pinnacle of the ceremony happens when representatives from groom’s family, bride’s family and church discuss the dowry groom’s family would pay for marrying the bride. In the end, Andreas paid a symbolic amount for Mouna and received cows and goats from the Mouna family as gifts. It was a great deal for him!

On the next day, Saturday, and next-to-last day of our visit, was the civil ceremony, presided by Niamey’s Mayor. There I was feeling at home, as this was similar of what we are used to have in Europe. Also the dressing code was similar to ours, suits for men and long dresses for ladies. And right after leaving the house and going to the hotel where the civil wedding would take place, I understood why suit is not very popular in a country with top temperatures of 40º and humidity over 90% all the time. The party ended late in the night, or better said, early in the morning, after sunrise. It seemed hard to keep dancing all night long, but in such a nice hotel over the Niger river, hanging out with happy people that imbue you of energy, you never feel tired.

And it’s because of these nice, always smiling and happy people that I fell in love with Africa. I want to go back soon, to Niger and to other African countries. For the love of Andreas and Mouna!

Here you can find photos of all the trip to Niger. If there is something you would like leave a comment.

Oscar

Did you read the previous post? If so, you’ve noticed that we were challenging you to guess what we will do in the area in front of the winery. In the comments’ section, you can see that Andy Velebil bet on a white grapes vineyard. Well, the answer is not correct, but in other place, we are actually planting a white grapes vines. The photo show the bulldozer preparing the soil of Quinta da Trovisca, and making the traditional terraces from the Douro, “patamares” or  “sucalcos” in Portuguese. We will plant Viosinho, Rabo-de-Ovelha Rabigato and Gouveio (also known as Verdelho) in March. But that will be shown in further posts. Stay tuned!

After picking up the last grapes, in Quevedo we are planing to do some activities to relax our muscles after the hard work. For those who have never harvested in the Douro, these may seem extreme sports; for us are a just a fun entertainment:

1. To swim in the Douro river against the flow, towards its source in Duruelo de la Sierra, Spain
2. To sail in the Douro, rowing on empty barrels from Ferradosa to the outlet in Porto
3. To run the Cima-Corgo marathon from S. João da Pesqueira to Pocinho
4. To prune 100 vines with our teeth
5. To defy S. Joao da Pesqueira’s #1 dominoes player for a duel out of seven matches
6. To practice “scuba diving” in the wine bins to control the fermentation process
7. To take L’amour (our mighty dog) out for a walk in the center of Pesqueira without a muzzle
8. To plant an hectare of vines with a hoe and a spade
9. To tow the train of the 3pm from Pinhão to Alegria with two friends
10. And this one’s for you to fill…. what do you suggest?

Top 9 elaborated by Joana, António and Pedro

Dear readers, the harvest is over. Finally! After six weeks picking up grapes at the vineyards and making wines at the winery, the hardest period of the year finished on Monday. For now only in the vineyards, because at the winery we still have some musts fermenting and some juicy to fortify.

Some thoughts about 2009 Harvest:

• generally there was few quantity per vine
• the quality of the grapes for Port is excellent
• the quality of the grapes for Douro wines is good, but will age early
• it was necessary over 750 kilograms to make 550 liters (1 pipa) of wine
• the sugar content of the grapes was high, resulting in quite alcoholic wines
• the colors of the wines are deep and dark – some very promising Ports
• after some years focusing only on still red wines, this year we made 2.000 liters of still white wine

Now it is your turn. Do you have any questions or comments?

Oscar

I’m tired, it’s late in the night, but I want to make sure I share with you the first photo of the harvest 2009.

Today was the first day. We are harvesting in Quinta das Olgas, in the Douro Superior, and Quinta da Alegria, in the border between Cima Corgo and Douro Superior. The grapes are very sweet, with potential alcohol around 15%. The vines have many leaves dried, resulting from a very hot weather during the four last weeks. Meanwhile, the nights started to coll off, specially in the last two days. It’s 11pm and the temperature outside is now around 16ºC (60º F).

The photo shows the first grapes arriving in 20kg plastic boxes from Quinta das Olgas, which is around 60km away from our winery.

Leave your comments!

Oscar

At the beginning of November, I wrote a post about wine related sites I like and I visit regularly in Internet. Lets continue that theme and make the II version. This time is just one site dedicated to Port Wine. Its name is ForTheLoveOfPort and probably sounds familiar to some of you. The team is composed by Roy Hersh, Stewart Todd, Andy Velebil and the recently joined David Spriggs, probably the hosts of the best forum for Port Wine lovers. The topics are mainly about Port Wine, but there is also space for Madeira Wine and for the more and more known Douro Wine.

Roy Hersh also writes a monthly newsletter for its subscribers. One of the topics of the newsletter is “A Question for the Trade”, which, as the name says, is a question from Roy or the FTLOP fun to the Port Wine Producers. For the December edition, Roy also invited Quevedo to participate, and we are very proud for this first collaboration in Roy’s newsletter. Well, I would like to suggest you to visit the web, participate in their forum and subscribe Roy’s newsletter. Especially for Port Wine lovers, the newsletter and the forum deserve to be read.

Oscar Quevedo

We can finally say that we have finished our harvest. Yesterday we made the last Port of the season from the last grapes that were still fermenting, 10 days after we had finished to pick-up grapes. As we use to say in the Douro: up to the wash of the boxes is vintage!

This year the harvest started on the 8th of September, which was not really early when compared with last years’ dates. But as this year the ripening was quite irregular, indeed an atypical year, we decided to start the harvest with lower sugar content. As we had posted at that time, we started in Douro Superior – Quinta das Olgas with Bé of between 12,6º and 13,4º. Quinta da Alegria finished a couple of days after, on the 13th of September and 3 days later we started to harvest in Quinta Vale D’Agodinho. At that time the Bé of this vineyard was similar to those of the previous vineyards.

After we had finished the harvest in Quinta Vale D’Agodinho we stopped for 10 days. We restarted on October 6th in the vineyards located at around 620 meters above the sea level, close to S. João da Pesqueira. Also these vineyards suffered from the low temperatures of the Summer, which did not allow very high sugar concentration, Grapes arrived at the winery with around Bé of 12,0º and 12,5º. Well, the good part is that we got wines with very fruity flavours, low pH and high total acidity. In spite of all ripening difficulties, the color obtained was quite good.

We had decided to harvest the Quinta da Trovisca after all our vineyard have been harvested. This vineyard is located at around 550 meters above the sea level and as a classification of B by the IVDP. Leaving it to the end of the harvest, this is mid October is a quite risky decision because an abundant rain previous to the harvest could had harmed the grapes. In Quinta da Trovisca we have all the grapes divided by varietal (which is not traditional in Douro) – touriga nacional, touriga franca, tinta roriz and sousão. And it came up to be a good decision to leave it to mid October. We got a very good color and an unique flavour, not yet smelt during all this vintage.

Thus, I can say it was a log harvest but it was not a worn out vintage. The breaks in the reception of grapes left us some time to work on other stuff. And we can say that the quality was good. However we have to wait for the evolution of the wines to figure out if they turn up excellent.

Now is time to reflect, to reorganize and come back to the routine. The Christmas is coming and as the tradition says, in the Christmas Eve we must all have a bottle of Port to celebrate the birth of Jesus. It is time to send our bottles to those who want to celebrate with Quevedo!

Come back soon,

Claúdia Quevedo