144 Port anD the Douro
to speak of, the latter is now almost non-existent. When new casks are required today, the
oak is bought from the Limousin and Alliers forests in France and coopered in Portugal.
New oak does not have a role to play in the maturation of Port. Unlike say, a Californian
Cabernet or classed growth Claret, the merest hint of new oak can detract from the
primary fruit character of a young Port. With a shortage of old wood, new Port producers
occasionally resort to using new oak that imparts a strangely sweet, vanilla-like character
to a naturally sweet wine. New casks should be well seasoned for a few years before they
are put into use, usually with unfortified Douro wine.
Although some of the larger shippers still maintain their own coopers, the demand
for wood is nowhere near as great as it was in the first half of the twentieth century when
the majority of wine was still shipped in cask. Chestnut was generally used for shipping
because it is cheaper and structurally more robust than oak, though it suffers from greater
evaporation. The few chestnut casks that remain are left over from this period. Coopers
are now retained on regular maintenance duty, repairing a pipe when a stave has been
damaged or dismantling and rebuilding a vat when it has to be moved. The main shippers
have a long-term programme of wood renewal. The recent closure and redevelopment
of a number of lodges in Vila Nova de Gaia has created work for coopers as vats are
dismantled, restored and reassembled.
Lesser Ports (white, ruby and inexpensive tawny) are generally stored in tanks made
from stainless steel or cement. These wines have traditionally remained up in the Douro
long after the premium-quality wines have been shipped down to Gaia, sometimes until
they are called upon to make up the final shipping blend prior to bottling. Since the
1990s, there has been a gradual but important shift to the Douro with an increasing
number of shippers maturing an ever greater proportion of their wine in purpose
built armazéns, mostly located on the altos at altitudes of 500 to 600 metres on the
margins of the region. Quinta do Noval led this trend, moving lock, stock and barrel
to the Douro after their lodges were destroyed by fire in 1981. With Vila Nova de Gaia
Douro-Bake
this is an expression that used to appear regularly in tasting notes, signifying a wine
that has been aged in the heat of the douro rather than the relative cool of Vila nova de
Gaia. douro-bake manifests itself as a stewed, sometimes volatile (so called vinagrinho)
and slightly unctuous character, especially in old tawnies that may have been kept by
an individual quinta, often with a view to selling them to a shipper at a later stage.
this phenomenon has as much to do with poor handling and hygiene as high storage
temperatures. When a Port shipper visits an outlying quinta just before the start of
vintage he will often slap the palm of his hand hard against the head of a wooden tonel
(horizontal vat) and immediately stick his head inside to sense the cleanliness (or lack
of it). on more than one occasion, it has been known for a flock of roosting chickens
to run out!