134 Port anD the Douro
as close as possible to that of a traditional lagar. All the tanks are conical for ease of
emptying (as in figure 2) and can be run off within forty-five minutes, the solid matter
being conveyed to the press by means of an Archimedes screw. The entire Quinta do Sol
winery, which has a production capacity of around 10,000 pipes (5.5 million litres), will
function during vintage with just six people. This represents a substantial labour saving
when compared to the twenty or so individuals required to tread a twenty-pipe lagar!
Pistons, Plungers anD roBots
Forty years after they were nearly decommissioned, the major shippers have come to accept
that traditional lagares generally produce the finest, most structured Ports. There can be
little doubt that the quality of vintage Port suffered from the mid-1970s to late 1980s,
the reasons for which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. In the early 1990s, when
vintage Port met with unprecedented success in the United States, a number of shippers
returned to using lagares, adapting them to the modern environment. At Quinta do
Vesúvio, which boasts some of the largest in the Douro, the Symington family devised
an innovative temperature-control mechanism. This consists of a mobile gantry with a
matrix of stainless steel pipes that can be lowered directly into the fermenting must. At
Quinta de Vargellas, under a programme named MacerPorto, Port shippers Taylor and
Fonseca set themselves a demanding challenge in the 1990s: ‘To develop or optimise new
production process able to, at least, match the performance of the foot-trodden lagar for
the production of vintage-type Port wine, thus enabling the replacement of the traditional
process.’ From 1997 onwards, under the auspices of Australian-trained wine maker David
Guimaraens, Quinta de Vargellas effectively became a laboratory for different methods of
extraction. These included pump-over fermenters (remontagem), so called auger fermenters
(tanks with rotating paddles), piston fermenters and the aforementioned rotary fermenter
or Vinimatic, as well as traditional foot-trodden lagares. Over a period of four years a series
of experiments were carried out under controlled conditions and the resulting wines were
assessed for taste as well as for anthocyanins and phenolic extraction. On the resulting
comparative performance index, the traditional, well-trodden lagar was proved to be the
most effective. This was followed by vertical vats equipped with pistons which registered
a relative performance of about 85 per cent. Much the least effective method, as might be
expected, were the pump-over fermenters which notched up a performance rating of just
60 per cent. On the basis of these results, Taylor and Fonseca went on to develop the piston
fermenter, optimising the design or ‘geometry’ of the vats to simulate that of a traditional
lagar. The resulting ‘P4’ prototype is a squat, circular, temperature controlled stainless steel
vat, three metres in diameter and a maximum of 1.3 metres deep. Open to the air like a
lagar, it has an inclined base to improve the mixing of the must and three stepped pistons to
depress the cap or manta must against the floor of the vat. Following further experiments in
2000, it was found that the performance of the new fermenter was similar to or even slightly
more effective at extracting anthocyanins and phenolics than a foot-trodden lagar. Taylor’s