142 Port anD the Douro
A month or two after the vintage, the lota takes place. The young wines are racked or
drawn off the sediment (lees), analysed and adjusted where necessary. It is not uncommon
for a Port to be fortified initially up to 16% alcohol and an extra measure of aguardente
is added to bring the level up to a minimum of 19% ABV. This provides the opportunity
for the first selection and classification. To a certain extent this is preordained. At the end
of vintage, the origin, quality and quantity of the individual lots of wine will generally
reflect a shipper’s overall requirements. A large shipper marketing a complete range of
different types of Port will end up with as many as 400 to 500 separate lots. Most large
Port producers are therefore equipped with a variety of different storage vessels in the
Douro. These vary greatly in size. There are concrete balões (also known colloquially as
‘mamas’ or ‘ginas’ – after Gina Lollobrigida – because of their shape), each capable of
holding up to 100,000 litres. Nowadays these are being superseded by stainless steel vats,
some of which double up as vats for fermentation. Smaller producers use wooden toneis
or even 550-litre pipes in which small parcels of high quality wine can be kept separate
for future appraisal. Some of the wine will remain in the custody of individual farmers
throughout the winter months.
In the spring following the harvest, the colour begins to recover as the young Ports
start to bind or ‘close up’. This is the cue for much of the previous year’s wine to be
shipped down from the Douro to Vila Nova de Gaia before the onset of the summer
heat. As the wines are prepared for shipment, they undergo a second racking from the
lees, and levels of sulphur dioxide are adjusted to protect the wine from undue oxidation.
The fraction of wine mixed in with the gross lees used to represent a considerable loss,
amounting to as much as 10 per cent of total volume. In order to keep their losses to a
minimum, producers would frequently empty the lees into canvas sacks, placing boards
and stones on top to squeeze as much wine as possible from the solid matter. Nowadays,
this troublesome and unhygienic practice has given way to the rotary vacuum filter, which
separates clean wine from solid matter. The wine is kept to one side and blended later into
lower-quality Ports.
For the best part of three centuries, the new wine was shipped downstream to Vila
Nova de Gaia by barco rabelo. These distinctive Viking-inspired boats were gradually
decommissioned following the construction of the railway in the 1870s and finally had
to be abandoned altogether when the river was dammed in the 1960s. With an increasing
amount of Port now being matured and bottled in the Douro, the region’s winding roads
are not quite so choked by spluttering articulated tankers from March through to May.
Maturation
Listen to the daily weather forecast for Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia and it often starts
in much the same way. The neblina matinal (morning mist), which drifts in during the
night from the Atlantic, often hangs around for much of the day during the winter
months, obscuring the top of the Torre dos Clerigos, the tallest church tower in Portugal.