How are our small new vines behaving? Last months’ rainfall is helping
Can you remember an old post of white vines being planted in Quinta da Trovisca? You do? Now you can see how our little new vines are growing! They are now around 30 cm big and showing great vitality. Some will already produce a few bunches this year, which we will cut and use as fertilizer. The quality of these grapes is not good enough for making wine and growing these bunches represents a huge effort for tiny and fragile vines like these to mature the grapes. The survival rate is, so far, outstanding high, over 98% of the vines survived. But the hardest period is now starting and it won’t finish before September, when temperatures start to go down. 
We are irrigating every other week with around 15 liters of water (we can’t irrigate too much as the vines have to get used to this dry weather and develop deep roots to find water in the soil). Some will certainly not be able to go through the Summer… the Douro is not an easy region for the vines.
I also posted a photo I made of this new vineyard last April and also another one sent by my friend and our active commentator on this blog, Thomas Kern, taken when he overflow the Douro valley a few weeks ago. Oscar
If you live in the US I have a proposal for you
Editor’s note: the offer is over, we sold 50% of the stock and folks are happy with the offer! If you live in the US this post is for you. You probably know that our wines are finally available in the US. My proposal is this: go to http://www.flickingerwines.com/, search for Quevedo wines, put an order of 6 bottles, send me the receipt of your order and you will be the 1st person on earth to try our Oscar’s 2009. I’ll ship a 75cl bottle sample of this wine to you and I’ll feature your review on the blog!
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
Things you shouldn’t do while drinking
I found these cartoons in the beverage list of Joey, a restaurant by the Lake Union in Seattle, where I had a… beer… after a wine tasting of Austrian wines in Daniel’s.
Have fun!
Oscar
What do you do when you don’t have enough wine for a tasting?
My two-week trip to the US is about to finish. I’m now in Charlotte on my way to Europe, Spain first and finally on Sunday afternoon I shall arrive in Porto. In the last few days I was in Los Angeles, visiting Andy Velebil, moderator at the forum For the Love of Port. Taking advantage of my visit to LA, we decided to show our wines to the wine community of LA. For that, Andy set up a tasting, at an Italian restaurant named Zucca, in downtown LA. Most of the people at the tasting were from LA county, but there were also 3 people coming from other States. Thank you Glenn, Eric I. and Eric M. for making this long way to LA, it made me really happy to be able to see you.
When I was planning which wines to present at the tasting, I didn’t have many doubts. We had to present the wines that are now being imported to the US. So the list included Oscar’s 2008, Quevedo Colheita 1996 and Quevedo Vintage 2007. I also asked my father if I could bring from Portugal our Colheita 1975, which rests at my parents cellar. He agreed.
If everything had gone as planned, the wines for the event would have been shipped from our importer’s warehouse directly to LA and I would bring the 1975 with me from Portugal. But there was a small issue. Part of the wines for the tasting were delayed in Indiana at the morning of the tasting. Andy and I panicked when we realized we wouldn’t have enough bottles of Oscar’s for the tasting. Only two bottles were with us. It What a nightmare, we invited 20 people to taste our wines and we didn’t have enough wine. With few options left, we decided to go to one of the biggest retailers in LA, K&L, to buy some Douro wine with a similar profile as Oscar’s. There were no many options and we finally decided to go for Crasto 2007. People at the tasting understood the situation and I think they actually found it interesting to taste these two wines side by side. I swore them I was not being paid by Quinta do Crasto to promote their wines in the US, actually they have a pretty good marketing team. The most important was to have wines for tasting!
Oscar
And the Best Winery Blog is….
The dream is over. I came to Walla Walla, Washington, to attend at the Wine Bloggers Conference. If you remind, the winners of the Wine Blog Awards, for which we were nominated for Best Winery Blog, would be revealed during the first day of the conference. This is what happened this afternoon. Although I really wished to bring home the award, the winner is Been Doon So Long. Congratulations to Randall Grahm for his work!
On the other categories, our good friends Ryan and Gabriella Opaz from Catavino won the category Best Writing On a Wine Blog and Joe Roberts from 1 Wine Dude won the prize for Best Overall Wine Blog.
For now I’m going to rest as this was a really long day. It was great to see a lot of folks that I met last year in Sonoma at the WBC 2009. The conference continues tomorrow and finishes on Sunday.
Oscar
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Presenting a documentary about Quevedo in New York
Quevedo is heading to North American, for its annual trip, with the same purpose of the trip in 2009: to attend to the American Wine Bloggers Conference. The conference will take place from June 25th to 27th in Walla Walla, WA. But before flying to the west cost, we will show our wines in New York City, Tuesday this week, where we will open some bottles of Oscar’s 2008 and share it with the 40+ people attending to the tasting.
The highlight of the tasting will be the presentation of a video that Zev Robinson, a Canadian residing in Spain , will show the audience how Catavino and Quevedo work together in the promotion of our wines using social media. Zev was in the Douro last May filming our winery, vineyards and daily life, and was also present at wine fairs and tastings to record enough material for a longer documentary about Quevedo, the Douro and Port Wine. He will come back in late July, and in early October for the harvest to complete his work. By the end of 2010, we will have a longer video to share with you so you can have better idea of how we promote a very traditional wine like Port Wine using social media.
In the meantime, I’ll show you the video Zev will present early this week in NYC and latter in Seattle.
Enjoy it and let me know which is the part you prefer.
Oscar
Oscar’s 2008 and some Quevedo Ports are now being listed on Naked Wines, an UK online wine retailer
Can you imagine what is happening to us? Our Douro wine Oscar’s 2008 and some Ports are now being listed on Naked Wines!! Yes, you read it correctly, naked wines. Does it mean that I’ll be naked in upcoming tastings? No, fortunately for everyone! It means that Oscar’s 2008 and some of our Ports can now be purchased in an on-line wine retailer which sells wines from many small winemakers throughout UK. As they say, they have nothing to hide, and as we also have nothing to hide, Oscar’s is now available on Naked Wines too. This is my presentation video for Naked Wines fans who didn’t know us before.
And don’t forget to let us know what you think about the wine!
Oscar
Fungus developing inside a broken bottle of Quevedo LBV 2003
Anyone has any idea of what is this on the photo? This is one of the most interesting things I learnt in the last weeks. I’ll explain where this comes from. We were preparing two of the four remaining pallets of LBV 2003 to send to Denmark when we found a purple stain on the side of one of the pallets, reaching some half a dozen of cases. I thought that it was a bottle that broke some time ago and spilled Port over the cases underneath.
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
Quevedo’s wines awarded? As we said before, we rather you taste it!
You know that we here, in our corner, love to hear what you think about our wines. So much that most of the time we don’t care too much about what the press says. In any case, and just to keep you informed about what is going on with our wines, I must tell you that the two Ports we launched in the last months were awarded by the International Wine Challenge. Quevedo Vintage 2007 got a silver medal while the Quevedo Colheita 1996 received a bronze medal. If you want to see other awarded wines, you can go to International Wine Challenge Awards 2010.
And you know, if you have something to say about our wines, write it now, or…. whenever you want!
Oscar
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1960 Vintage Port Tasting in London - the first good harvest of the great 60s
A couple of weeks ago I attended one of those tastings of Port Wine that I have been dreaming of for a long time. Tom Archer, a Port Wine enthusiast from the UK, who would be 50 on May 2010, was the perfect excuse for the members of The Port Forum set up a tasting of Vintage 1960, Tom’s year of birth. With 14 bottles on the table to share between 13 people, we had a chance to taste some very rare bottles in generous portions!
For the first time I tasted a bottle from Quinta do Rei, currently owned by Messias, which is located in front of our vineyard Quinta Vale d’Agodinho. Quinta do Rei is contiguous to Quinta do Cachão and was bought in 1958 from Gonzalez Byass. Latter Messias family incorporated Quinta do Rei in Quinta do Cachão and no longer bottling Quinta do Rei, making this bottles even rarer. In my opinion, the stars of the tasting were Croft, Noval, Dow’s and Delaforce. Croft and Delaforce were both elegant and delicate while Noval and Dow’s presented a nice body and structure.
At the end of the tasting some of the attendees said that Vintage 1960 wouldn’t be worth the price you pay for that (around 120 eur a bottle). This may be true, and although some of the bottles didn’t show well, others were worth each cent we paid for that!
Oscar
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=504f5ddc-1eac-4b4f-9549-98d9026d8e62 "1960 Vintage Port Tasting in London the first good harvest of the great 60s")
Quevedo was founded in 1991 as a family owned business in the heart of the Douro valley, responding to the needs of the generations that preceded the associate founders. These ancestors were passionately dedicated to their vineyards and to the culture that surrounded the production of wine. Consequently, the company was created as a seamless marriage between the initial phase of production and the promotion and selling of their wines. Currently, the estate is comprised of 100 hectares located in the regions of Cima-Corgo and Douro Superior, producing both red and port wines from only the five traditional port grapes Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Tinto Cão and Tinta Barroca. 