Port anD the Douro 159Garrafeira
The term garrafeira meaning ‘private wine cellar’ or ‘private reserve’ is usually associated with
Portuguese light wines rather than Port. Until 2002 it did not form part of the IVDP’s official
lexicon and, as far as I am aware, has only been used by one shipper, Niepoort, to designate
a unique style of Port. Under the legislation, wines from a single year are aged for at least
seven years in wood before spending a minimum of eight years in glass demi-johns (these
are known colloquially as bon-bons). In practice the wines age for considerably longer than
the minimum. After twenty, thirty, even forty years or more in glass, the wine is decanted
off its sediment and rebottled in conventional 75cl bottles. For example, Niepoort’s 1967
Garrafeira was ‘bottled’ (i.e. put into 5- or 10-litre glass demi-johns) in 1972 and ‘decanted’
(i.e. bottled) in 1981. Garrafeira wines combine the oxidative character and complexity of
tawny with the more reductive bottle-ageing of vintage Port. These unusual wines are the
only ones to bridge the gap between wood-matured Port and bottle-matured in terms of
weight and style. An undeclared 1945 Cockburn tasted in 2012 technically qualifies as a
garrafeira having been decanted from a demi-john into bottles in 1972.
colour
the first facet of a young Port assessed in any tasting is its colour. depth and hue
are fundamental indicators of the quality and style of the wine and go some way to
helping predict its future evolution. From tastings during the last decade or so i have
noticed that there is much less variation in colour, particularly among young vintage,
single quinta vintage and late bottled vintage Ports. nearly all the wines seem to share
the same deep, opaque crimson-purple colour. there are two reasons for this. Firstly
extraction methods have greatly improved in the winery (see earlier in chapter). the
other reason (and perhaps the most important) stems from the replanting of vineyards
in the 1980s, with more emphasis having been given to grape varieties that contribute
colour than in the old pick and mix vineyards. Many of these newer vineyards are now
at the peak of their production and the grapes are forming part of the vintage lote.