In one sentence: Port Wine is a fortified wine that comes from a specific region in the North of Portugal – the Douro Valley.

“Fortified” means that very strong grape spirit was added to the wine (normally containing 77% alcohol).  This happens during the fermentation. During the fermentation all of the sugar is converted by yeast into alcohol – if nobody stops the process. However, the 77% strong brandy does stop this process – it’s so strong that it kills the yeast. The fermentation comes to a stop and the residual sugar remains in the wine – and this is why Port Wine is so sweet. The ratio of Brandy to Wine is approximately 1:4 – and this gives us in the end an alcohol volume of roughly 20%-21% for the mixture – which is now officially called Port Wine.

The brandy is added 2 or 3 days into the fermentation process – when half the sugar is still remaining in the wine. By the way: I like most of the jobs that the Port Trade has to offer – however, there are a few people that have my biggest compassion: The tasters at the Port Wine Institute. Yes, they do taste every single Port Wine that is sold commercially – so that sounds like something fantastic. But… they also have to taste the quality of the 77% strong brandy – which suddenly doesn’t sound like so much fun. It’s important that the brandy doesn’t alter the aroma or color of the Port Wine – it’s absolutely mandatory that the brandy is colorless and flavorless. To make sure, all the grape spirit used for Port Wine needs to get approved by the Tasters at the Port Wine Institute. I had the pleasure to try some of this brandy – and this was a painful experience. luckily the grape spirit is very much diluted when its tasted at the Port Wine Institute.

Why does the wine have to come from a specific region? What makes the Douro Valley so special? Two things make the Douro Valley very special: The climate and the soil. The climate. Whenever you read an article about the Douro Valley, there is a good chance that it will bring the famous sentence “9 meses de inverno, 3 meses de inferno”. Which is Portuguese, of course, and means “9 months of winter, 3 months of hell”. The winters are cold, we see temperatures close to the freezing point, sometimes we have snow and ice in the valley. There is also quite some rain in the winter. However, the summers are very dry and very hot – and we see temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius.

How can the vines survive this drought and the heat? Here comes the second feature to help: The soil. The soil consists of schist. This rock is able to store water – however, it’s pretty deep underground. But the textures of schist helps the roots of the wine to grow down, towards the water. Roots can be 10 meters and more long and enable the plant to have access to humidity, even if everything seems dry and hot on the surface. The surface of the Douro Valley is very dusty – schist that has fallen apart due to rain, sun and wind. The fact that the climate is so dry and hot has many implications: We have to trim the vines , because every branch and every leave will require a little bit of water. We let the vines grow just enough to give us grapes. These grapes are very concentrated – it’s no real fun to eat them… The grapes that we can by for consumption in the supermarket are much nicer to eat.

These concentrated grapes are the backbone of Port Wine. They enable the wine to develop a structure that will make it possible to age the wine for decades. To get so concentrated grapes we have to let the plant suffer. Like a good poet has to suffer to be able to write the most beautiful love poems, a vine has to suffer to give us these concentrated grapes. It’s a balance between quantity and quality. We could give a lot of water to the vine and it would be happy and have many and huge grapes – but these grapes wouldn’t be concentrated. They would be watery. We could make a lot of wine – but it wouldn’t be a great wine. By forbidding nearly all producers to use irrigation the plants have only the water available that the ground can provide to the plant (the exception to irrigation are for very newly planted vines and for some vineyards in very dry and very hot locations at the eastern border of the demarcated region, in the Douro Superior).

To take full advantage of the grapes, we need to extract as much color and tannins from the skin – and this happened for several centuries in “Lagares”, granite stone basins. As this is very labor intensive, only the best Port Wines are today still produced in this way – most Port is produced not by treading the grapes but with several automatic systems; even if the robotic lagares are doing a great job, many producers still believe that the best Port Wine is made by treading.

 

The harvest is normally during the month of September. It’s very helpful for the producers that the Douro Valley has so many different micro-climates… because it would be a nightmare if all grapes would mature at the same moment. Luckily the grapes in the dry, hot easter part are ripe before the grapes in the west… The grapes closer to the river are earlier matured than the grapes higher on the hills… Grapes in sun-facing hills mature before grapes that don’t have full sun-exposure. Therefore the harvest can take 4-6 weeks… and while it’s a lot of work, for most of the people in the Douro Valley this is the most beautiful time of the year. There is a vibrating buzz all over the valley; many tourists and wine  professionals join the thousands of harvesters and bring color and excitement to the valley.

The first winter the wine stays in the Douro Valley, in barrels and tanks of all kinds and shapes. Small wooden barrels, large steel-tanks, even cement tanks – wine is stored everywhere. While in the past more or less all Port Wine was transported by boat to Porto/Gaia, things are now different. There are two reasons for this: in the past it was very difficult to control the temperature of the storage facilities in the Douro Valley. The summers can be brutally hot – and that wasn’t ideal for the wine and it developed a certain aroma that is called “Douro bake”. However, now that we have electricity in the valley it’s easier to use air condition. Some producers have also invested a lot of money and built large storage cellars deep underground, where the temperature remains nice and cool during the whole year. The second reason that more Port Wine is now stored in the Valley itself is the fact that Port Wine doesn’t need to be stored anymore by law in Gaia. Until Portugal joined the European Union, all wine needed to be exported out of the “Entreposto”, a small part of Gaia. Now independent producers have the possibility to sell the wines directly, without going through the logistic nightmares of transporting the wine to Porto/Gaia and to store it there. The lodges in Gaia are in a very old part of the town – a town that was build for horses and oxen. Not for cars. Which makes it very difficult for large modern tank-trucks to navigate their way through medieval streets and when you walk through Gaia, you see along the walls of the houses – especially near corners – all the scratch-marks from side-mirrors of those trucks…

The first Port Wine is ready for being sold after 2 years – the Vintage Port. But most Port Wine stores longer, much longer, for many more years. There are many, many categories of Port Wine – which makes the wine slightly confusing for the beginner… but that gives incredible pleasure opportunities for the connoisseur.

So, now after all the talking… coming back to our original question: What is Port Wine? Port Wine is a fortified wine that comes from a demarcated region of the Douro Valley and has to be approved by the Port Wine Institute.