Port anD the Douro 137quantity to begin a fermentation. Where white grapes are batch planted they are the first
to be harvested.
In the winery, prolonged maceration on the skins leads to the over-extraction of
phenolic compounds, resulting in wines that taste hard and tend to brown rapidly with
age. Although there are some excellent examples of this traditional style of white Port,
foot trodden in lagar and aged in wood, there is a general trend towards making lighter,
less extractive wines. Where possible, skin maceration is increasingly limited to the few
hours prior to the onset of fermentation when the juice is run off and vinified separately.
Fractions of pressings are usually mixed with the free-run juice in a process known as meia
curtimenta. The fact that most Douro adegas are geared up for red wines rather than white
means that pressing tends to be quite severe, accentuating the extractive character of the
wine. Some producers have therefore resorted to making very light wines with little or no
skin contact, the solids separated by cold settling for twenty-four hours, often aided by
pectolytic enzymes. With the advent of temperature control, fermentation temperatures
tend to be lower than for red Ports but are not as low as they might be for an unfortified
the use (anD aBuse) oF ‘B aga’
elderberry, baga do sabugueiro or merely ‘baga’ for short, has been used to enhance
the colour of Port ever since it became a fortified wine at the end of the seventeenth
century. it was the widespread abuse of baga in the mid-eighteenth century that forced
the Marquês de Pombal to order that all the elderberry trees in the douro should be
grubbed up. But only a few years elapsed before baga reappeared, and by the middle
of the nineteenth century its use was once more fairly commonplace. henry Vizetelly
describes the use of baga in the 1870s: ‘it is quite possible that some small farmers
deepen the colour of their wine in bad years – in good years it has ample colour of its
own – by steeping in it a bag filled with dried elderberries...’
although i have never found anyone adding baga to a lagar, i am told it is still in
use and i can think of a number of abnormally deep-coloured vintage Ports from the
1977 and 1980 vintages where baga may have been used. Most of the elderberry trees
are to be found in the higher peripheral areas south of the river (the altos), especially
above the town of tabuaço – to the extent that baga is sometimes referred to covertly
as the ‘tabuaço grape’. the fruit ripens in late august and can therefore be dried and
stored until the vintage begins in mid-september. certainly, whenever i have gone up
to the altos on the south side of the douro in early september the elderberry bushes
have been completely stripped. the trick, as it has been explained to me, is to conceal
a sack of dried elderberry at the bottom of a lagar full of grapes. a lone treader will then
mark time to rehydrate and extract colour from the baga which, provided it is used in
judicious quantities, does not affect the taste or smell of the wine and is obviously quite
harmless.