Melanie Drane spoke with Christian Seely, general manager of Quinta do Noval at the Douro estate in April 1997-- shortly after Wine Spectator awarded the 1994 Quinta do Noval Nacional a score of 100 points.
Christian Seely: My background is very much wine-orientated. My father has been a wine merchant and writes about wine. So I took in wine with my baby bottle. Then the first business I started was a food & wine mail order business, which I began straight after university. After that, I took an MBA at Fountainbleau, and really it was the MBA-- because my mail-order business was doing all right without me there-- that led me to working in the management of small and medium-size businesses for Guiness Marr. I did that for several years, but I was looking around for something else that was related to wine, which has always been the thing that I like.
Then Noval came up, and it's really the most perfect combination, because it's a long-term assignment. You can't do port unless you do it longterm. There's a business to run, so for that side of things, it's useful to have the training. You can't be more involved in wine than running Quinta do Noval, so for me it's a combination of everything that I enjoy doing most. I'm here to run the business; I'm not the winemaker. But I'm here to make sure that everything works well, and that all the technical team work well together and produce the job.
MD: How have you found the transition from a mail-order business, into the production side of wine?
CS: Fascinating and extremely enjoyable. It's always been this side of things that interests me the most. I don't think you can be interested in wine without being interested in how it's made and where it comes from. I've always wanted to get involved in the production side. But obviously, if you stay in England, you can't do that, unless you're prepared to make Muller-Thürgau. It's been thoroughly enjoyable, and working with Jean-Michel Cazes, I couldn't possibly have had a better mentor. And in fact the winemaker here at Noval is a man called Antonio Grellos, who is a brilliant man with an awful lot of experience.
MD: Was he here before the transition?
CS: He did some consulting, but he wasn't here full time until afterward.
[....conversation is interrupted for a tour the Noval vineyards...]
MD: Do you think that there's any chance that the EU will eventually come to allow irrigation?
CS: I don't know. It wouldn't make much sense here in the Douro, because there isn't enough water, even if you wanted to. And it isn't desireable, because there's a general rule, which I think holds true, that the harder the vine has to work, the greater the quality of wine. And here in the Douro, one of the reasons that you get a great product is because since the soil isn't very rich, and you haven't got much rain, the vines have to work extremely hard to get water. They send their roots down sometimes as far as 30 yards deep into the rock. I think that's one of the reasons you get quality.
I think if you irrigated, the vines wouldn't do that; they're lazy like anyone. They'd be more vulnerable, because if you had along period of drought and your hosepipe backed up or something like that, the vines wouldn't have that resource of going down deep into the earth. So it wouldn't be desireable. I think that it would be a bad idea, even if it were allowed. Even with new plantations, we try not to do it if we can, for the same reason; we want them to work.
This cellar is our Vila Nova de Gaia. Quinta do Noval is unique among the port shippers in that we're the first to move all our installations up here to the Douro. All of this was shipped back up from Gaia. There are several reasons why it's a good thing and why it's helpful for us. Most importantly, is management. My winemaking team can all be in one place, whereas in the old days, when we had everything in Gaia, they were half the time in Gaia and half here, and this way, the winemaker at Noval...his office is just over there, the stock is here, the blending room is here, the vineyard is just down the stairs, and his attention is concentrated on all these things all the time. And he, I, and everyone else, spends much less time travelling from one place to another. That's the principal logistical justification for doing it.
Bill Campbell: Is there anywhere else in the world, where vineyard and production are split in different locations, separated by such a trip?
CS: I don't know of anywhere. It's hard to imagine the winemaker of Ch. Lafite living in Bordeaux and having an office in Bordeaux; it's most unusual. And that's how port wine trade generally is. For us, the vineyard is absolute central to the way we think about port, and so it's very important to us that the whole team are here all the time so that they can concentrate on all the sides of winemaking, from the vineyards to the barrels, without having to go from one place to another.
MD: Vintage port must the only great wine in the world, where there is such a cleft between the place of origin and the final product. Even in the mind of the consumer, for so long, there has been that severance between the two.
CS: Exactly.
MD: Do you think that by moving back to a place, by locating the wine with an estate, do you think that will have a positive effect on the way consumers identify the wine?
CS: Yes I do actually. I believe that anything we do that attracts people's attention to where port comes from has got to be a good thing for port. Obviously, consumers of the finer wines, vintage ports and old tawnies, they know that port is a fine wine. But consumers of some of the more basic levels of port, in countries like France and Belgium, where they buy large amounts of quite cheap port, very often, they don't even know that it's a wine at all. So I think that anything we can do to attract people's attention to the area of production, the Douro Valley, with its maginificent vineyards-it concentrates people's minds on what port actually is.
That's part of the whole way that Quinta do Noval is positioned. If you think about it, we're the only one of the traditional port shippers whose name and image is based on the name and image of a vineyard. All the others are based on a founder, a person. Also, our main vintage port comes just from this vineyard, and it carries the name of this vineyard. It's QdN vintage port. We don't take grapes from other vineyards and make a blend. That's unique as well.
Other people make single-quita vintage ports, but if they're port shippers, it's usually their second vintage port, as it were. There are exceptions: the Symingtons have Vesuvio, which is a thing apart. And there are also one or two single quintas here in the Douro that are starting to produce vintage port from their own quinta. I think that all that is an extremely positive development for the Douro and for port wine generally.
Consumers are interested in the area of production; they're interested in the vines and the terroir where the product comes from. And port has so far been an exception to that. I think that's going to change; it is changing.
MD: What has been the reaction from the trade to your pioneering move of production back to the vineyards? Do you see yourself as setting a trend? Will others be following you? Or have you encountered skepticism?
CS: Oh, I wouldn't presume to say that anyone is going to follow where we've gone. I'm only saying that for us, it makes a lot of sense. And I think in the abstract, you can see that there are positive arguments for it. But having said that, there are also very strong arguments of tradition for people to stay where they are. You can imagine, it was a huge amount of work to bring all of this stuff here. Each one of these large barrels have to be dismantled piece by piece, and each piece of wood numbered. Then the wine had to be brought up here in stainless steel vats on the back of a lorry, and then the barrel put back together agaian, and the wine put back in the barrel.
It's an an enormous work. Also, there is a huge weight of tradition behind the situation in Gaia. So I don't think there's going to be a wholesale move back to the Douro. I know that certain technical directors of other houses are quite envious of my technical team, in that they can be here full-time in the vineyards; there's an enormous advantage in that. But perhaps a lot of other people are just waiting to see how it works for us.
MD: You must often hear the stereotype arguments about the benefit of a moist climate, and...
CS: We have air-conditioning; they don't have that there. I think we have a better-controlled climate than they do in Gaia. Well, that's my point of view.
BC: I guess it would also take some time to get the momentum of finding the employees here.
CS: That is a point. There is a slight lack of the kind of personnel that one might want sometimes, here in the Douro. For offices, particularily, there aren't yet the kind of employees available, and people are quite reluctant to move here. So I've had to keep an office in Vila Nova de Gaia, because my personnel there didn't want to move. It's a very nice team, and what they say goes. So we keep the office in Gaia, but everything else is down here.
MD: Is this a move that you personally set in motion, or was it something that Jean-Michel Cazes had in mind?
CS: This is a move that the family who used to own QdN started. They moved the stocks up to the Douro. They had actually some quite substantial pieces of real estate in the center of Porto where they were aging wine. This is another very important argument-- financially, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be aging wine in a city-center real estate site. There's a big financial argument for selling out the property in the center of the city, realizing the capital for investments in whatever you want to make, vineyards, or whatever, and bringing everything back here and building a relatively simple building. You get a lot of change out of it.
I think that the family who owned Noval before did that for primarily financial reasons at the time. They had started the move. When they sold the company, they were betwixt and between, they had the stocks here, but they had a warehouse in Porto and they still were bottling the wine in Porto. But I'm sure they would logically have finished the move one day. But anyway, we took the decision as soon as we bought the company, to complete the procedure, so we built a bottling line here, and a warehouse about six miles up the road. So we now have everything based here. We completed what had already been started.
MD: Could you tell us a bit about the transition between the past ownership and present? Did the family remain in an advisory role initially? Or have you retained a significant portion of the staff? How do you feel the philosophy or vision of the future of this place has changed, if it has?
CS: Well, the family sold Noval and has nothing to do with the company anymore. But as far as the personnel is concerned, I found a fantastic team of people when I arrived here. I brought in a few new people, but not many, about five or six, out of a staff of 60 people. I've promoted one or two people up to positions of responsibility. But generally, the idea has been stability as far as personnel is concerned.
That's quite important in Portugal and in the port trade particularily, because people who work in port companies become very much attached to the company, with a kind of loyalty to the vineyard and the wine that is most unusual in most business these days. Business tends to be rather short-term in its attitude to personnel, in general. I take the view that since the personnel that we have has a long-term commitment to the company, and really a deeply-felt enthusiasm, we have to have a long-term commitment to them on the same basis.
So no, there haven't been too many radical changes. It's been an evolution, bringing in one or two people, and promoting up one or two people. As far as the general philosophy of the company is concerned, there's no radical departures taking place. My inspiration is the great, historical tradition of Noval, the great wines of the past that Noval made-- and I want to make more wines like that.
I don't feel that you can make great wines as they were made in the past by taking radical steps in a new direction. The idea is to build on what was here before and try and do better. But there's no radical departures taking place.
An example of that is winemaking in lagares. We make about half our production treading by foot here in lagares. I say half our production-- it's all the production of the quinta, and some of our better suppliers. When you first look at winemaking in lagares, you think, it's ridiculous, it's a very primitive way of making wine. There must be a better way of doing it, with modern, stainless steel vats, and temperature-controlled equipment and things like that. And we have built a modern winery, with all the equipment, but the fact remains that for making the great wines, the great vintage ports, the great old tawnies, treading in lagares still produces the best results. And so we''re not changing it, we're sticking with it. For as long as that produces the best wine, we'll carry on doing it.
There are a few things that one can do to help. For example, one of the problems with lagares is controlling temperature during fermentation. It might be that harvesting takes place on a very hot day, or a very cold day. Either way. If it's very cold, the grapes take quite a long time to start fermenting. So we've introduced a tube for the grapes to arrive in the lagares which has got a double skin, so we can either heat or cool them before they arrive in the lagares. So there are little things that one can do with modern technology to help along, but still respect the tradition.
Another thing we've done with the lagares is a departure but still maintains the old system. The problem with lagaraes is that they are quite expensive. If you're going to do it properly with a decent-size lagare, you'll need 24 people at least to tread it; if you use less, you don't get the same effect. These days, it's quite difficult to find enough people who are free to do it or want to do it. And it's expensive and gets more expensive every year as wages rise in Portugal. So there is a danger that in tne years it may be too expensive even if you can find the people. So we're committed to making wine in the lagares, so we've invented and developed a robot to tread the wine in the lagares. So our inspiration is the past but we've tried to add something that will help it to work better.
The robot is most unimpressive when you see it. I had visions that it was going to be like a row of human legs, like a row of can-can girls. But I was very disappointed to see it come with a row of four stainless steel pistons; it works on compressed air and it has no personality at all. But it does function. This year was the second year that we've had him functioning. The first year, he didn't have enough power in his little feet and so we had to have human beings starting it off...afterwards, when the grapes were a bit crushed, he was able to carry on. This year, we made his legs a bit longer, which gave him more power, and he had more whoomph behind him, and could do a whole lagare from beginning to end.
MD: No singing and dancing, though, I suppose?
CS: Didn't sing and dance! On the other hand, he doesn't drink and he doesn't complain.
This is where most of the older tawnies are....For the size of the company, we've got sizeable stocks. The more specialized you are in the higher quality ports, like LBVs or 10-year old tawnies, the more stocks you have to have, obviously. If you sell a bottle of ten-year old tawny, you have to have, theoretically, ten bottles of wine in stock, one nine year old, one eight-year-old, etc., to provide for your tawny sales in the years to come. If your 10 year-old tawny sales are increasing, even by a modest percent, the pyramid base has to widen in quite an alarming way to provide the bottle of 10-year-old port in 10 years time, if your sales go on increasing like that.
It's one of the most complicated things about running a port wine company: managing a pyramid of stocks. You've more or less got to say, in ten years' time, I'm going to be sellling...50,000 or 80,000 bottles of ten-year old or something like that, so I've got to start putting aside that wine for ten year's time. It's absolutely crucial.
One of the few sad things about Noval is that in '82 there was a huge fire in the offices in Gaia and all the records were destroyed. There are a lot of things that we don't know about the past. There are certainly barrels here that are more than 100 years old.
MD: That brings me to a question that may be less than diplomatic. On occasion, it's been said that QdN's quality suffered during the 'eighties. Do you think that's true and if so, why?
CS: As I said, my inspiration is the great tradition of the past, not necessarily the recent past. So is that an answer?
MD: It's quite a spectacular start to receive a 100-point score for your first vintage port. Does that place pressure on you for the future?
CS: There's always pressure, isn't there? It was very nice. But we'll always try to make the best wine we can. This is the laboratory. We sold our autovinificators because we didn't feel they gave us enough control over the wine during fermentation, which is very short in port. With our new system (three years old; harvest of '94), we can pump it as much and as often as we like. We're extremely pleased with these vats. These are exceptional, very special, we made a little design change to the typical ones. First, they're not autovinificators; they have a pumping-over system which we can control. Second, they have a lot of temperature control. Third, we made them shorter and fatter because we want to try and create as much as possible the conditions that exist in lagares.
One of the reasons why lagares are still such an effective way of making good port is because it's down to this question of extraction during fermentation. You have a very good ratio in a lagare between the volume of must and the surface on the top which enables you to extract the maximum during that fermentation period. By having the vat short and fat you get a bit the same thing-- not quite the same ratio.
They're horizontal presses, something that has two plates that come together that stop as soon as there's a certain amount of pressure, so it doesn't extract too much of what we don't want to extract; all the pips remain entirely whole.
Introduction to Antonio Grellos:
MD: Ah, the blender for the much acclaimed '94 vintage...
AG: So they say, yes. [laughter]
MD: Was it clear to you early on in the process that it would be as spectacular as...
AG: No, no! I thought it was a good year, but....
CS: We'll do better later.
AG: We are working for that. It was a surprise; everybody likes the wine, so it is good.
The weather was perfect. In the Douro vineyards, there was not too much quantity, which is good.
M: Could you tell us about your background as blender.
A: I was studying architecture, and then there was the revolution, so I went to Bordeaux, because my family was in a joint venture with Sandeman, making wine in Bordeaux. So I thought I would go; I did a kind of tasting degree. When I came back, I worked one year with my family, at Sandeman and then, I went to work at Oporto in Gaia to a big, big company-Royal Oporto, one of the biggest, millions and millions [?], it's kind of crazy...There was a blender consultant who was one of the best in the Gaia. It was Frederico Gonzales [?sp], a very good blender. So I worked with him two years; he taught me quite a lot. Then I jumped to Ferreira, where I worked for about eight years.
And then I came back to my old property, a small quinta here, to take care of it and renovate all the vineyards because it was the time of subsidies and it was the moment. So I said to Ferreira bye-bye. I came here, and Christian van Zeller was the director of Noval 8 years ago, and he asked me to help him, so I came. I started as a consultant 'til AXA bought Noval. That's more or less what I've been doing for the last 20 years.
M: I've read that the Sousao varietal is especially important here.
A: Yes, everybody says that's not a good variety. But in the north-facing vineyards of Noval, we are quite happy with the vine. It helps us a lot. It is fruity, very powerful, and it is one of the pieces to the blend. But as you know, all the region, there are many microclimates, so the variety can be very good here, and not so good elsewhere.
M: Which varietals especially stand out in the context that you have here? [620]
A: Touriga Nacional, Tinto Cao, Sousao, and Touriga Francesa. And Tinta Roriz, but mainly Touriga Nacional and Sousao.
B: Do you have field blends here?
A: Yes, we do in the old, traditional vineyards. But we are in the process of replanting. All the new plantations are single, seperate varietals.
M: James Suckling recently wrote that '94 was the greatest vintage for port since the legendary '45. Richard Mayson in the Decanter was more hesitant to compare '94 with other vintages. Do you think that statements like Suckling's are well-justified? Do you share his statement?
C: Trick question. I never let him talk to journalists.
A: I don't know if I understand. We must wait. How can we compare a recent vintage with one of the best of the century. I'm younger than '45, I wasn't there, I don't know. I think 45 is a very good year; everybody says...the wines I drink were already old, very verry good. This wine is quite young, so I don't know. They are two good vintages, but certainly different in my opinion.
M: I wondered how winemakers react when they hear these grand statements.
A: Maybe he's right, maybe he's right! Yeah, why not! [laughter]
[...leave lab; take car into vineyards...]
C: This is a plantation of patamares, all Touriga Nacional. One of the good things done by my predecessor here. Planted 8-9 years ago, and already giving extremely high quality wine, because it's all Touriga Nacional. It was a very important element in the '94 vintage.
M: Are you suffering any erosion problems with these?
C: No actually, it's better than with the old terraces with walls, because when you have rain, the walls just fall down. With the patamares, the rain comes out the sides. But these are all fairly recent and the real test will be if they're here in 30 years time. So far it looks really very good.
M: We've seen some vertical vineyards going in.
C: Yes, that's the idea if you've got land that will take it. But you need slopes that aren't too steep. Some people have been very brave and done them on really steep slopes.
The Douro is full of these little roads that were actually made for donkeys or bullet carts.
M: Are your local staff from neighboring village or do you increasingly have to bring them in?
C: People who work here full time are from principally 3 local villages.
And the people who come in for the harvest are temporary workers who come from far away, a little village in the mountains. There's a particular village about 30 miles away in the mountains and they come here every year to pick the grapes. It suits them because it's a village that isn't very rich. It's very important for us, because it gives us a reliable source of labor.
This is phase 1 of our replanting program; these vines were all planted last year, all seperated grape varieties. This is very unusual for the Douro, because normally when people replant, they bulldoze, because maintaining walls is very expensive, and it's very difficult to mechanize the old terraces. If you have to work a terrace by hand, it's very expensive. We've dug up the old vines. Our policy has been, any parcel that has not been producing vintage quality: dig it up and start again.
My aim is to produce substantial quantities of high quality vintage port at QdN in the years to come. So anywhere that is capable of producing vintage port but is not, because the grape varieties weren't right or the vines were too old, we've replanted. So it's a large program, but will yield some significant longterm results.
We've made a little ramp in between each terrace at both ends, which means that a small tractor can get from terrace to terrace, which was never the case before. Also, the distance between the vines is exactly the same. In the old days, they never had machines, so they just planted them any old way. So, if you make an access to each terrace and plant the vines an equal distance apart, you can mechanize the terraces. That's what we've done.
This is Tinta Roriz here...It's quite an exciting project because it will have fantastic longterm results on the quality of the wine we're going to make here and above all, on quantity of it.
Vintage port is always a wine of selection; it might easily be that only 5% of the production of your vineyard goes into vintage port in a vintage year. That's always been the case, but there's no reason why it should be considered to be inevitable. In my view, if the vineyard is capable of producing great wine, one should try to get as much of it to produce vintage port as possible.
B: What target age do you have?
C: A vineyard starts producing grapes that you can use for table wine w/in three years; w/in 5 years legally, you can make port with it. But you're not likely to make vintage quality with vines that young. Having said that, the young patamares of TN that we just drove thru were only 8 years old, and they were important in the '94 vintage.
So I find that extremely encouraging.
Most of the '95 vintage which we're going to declare-that's a scoop-most of it comes from modern patamares planted w/ seperate grape varieties that are all young, btwn 9-12 years old. Obviously the ideal would be to have terraces planted with single grape varieties, all 30 years old...but we've been able to make two quite good quality vintages, '94 & '95, from young vines which are planted with the noble varieties seperated. So I have great hopes that in 7 or 8 years we'll be getting similar results from here, but with the difference that there's a lot more of it.
M: With the strengthening of the single quinta port phenomenon, do you think that vintage as a concept in the port trade may change, and mean, as with other wines, simply, "wine of a particular year" rather than the different notion of declaring vintages based on what the market can bear, etc.?
C: It's a very intersting idea. I think that what is going to happen, and is already happening, is that with the far greater attention paid to planting & vineyards, and grape varieties used, and with the much greater sophistication in vinification over the last 10-15 years, I think you'll get far more years that can be declared vintage port, even in the traditional notion of vintage port. Of course one is always subject to God and the weather, and there will be years when it's impossible...but I hope that with the work that we are doing, and a lot of other people are as well, you'll see increasing quantities of vintage port, and perhaps more frequent declarations as a result of those advances.
With regard to the single quinta and make every year a wine coming from that quinta with the year on it and treating vintage as you do in, say, Bordeaux, that's a subject for huge debate. The Port Wine Institute who control these matters are very commited to protecting the idea of vinatge port declared in years of exceptional quality only, and I think that they would resist such a notion. But I think it is something that could be debated a lot further. because to me, if a wine comes from a particular vineyard in a particular year, even if it's not actually "vintage", it might well be interesting to make a wine from it and sell it as wine from that vineyard, from that year. That is something that is certainly not likely to happen in the near future. It's a possible evolution for port; I don't know. My feeling is, at any rate, that you're just going to see vintages more often.
B: How did the idea develop in the port trade that only exceptional years would be declared?
C: Perhaps one of the reasons is that the weather is so difficult here. Its very idfficult to make wine, or to grow grapes here here. You have great extremes of temperature variation, and an extremely variable climate. Quite often, it's the weather that just doesn't give you the quality you need to make wine. Having said that, one shouldn't complain, sometimes everything is right and you get a superb result, which is vintage port. But it is different, and I think the whole area does need to be debated. But the way that things are at the moment, as I understand it, is that the PWI is absolutely committed to the notion of vintage port declarations only in exceptional years. And we're some way off from a situation where a given vineyard is allowed to declare a wine from a given year and put the year on, when it's not a declared vintage.
Of course, you have LBV, which you can produce from years that are not necessarily vintage years and I suppose that is a sort of halfway house or compromise. But it's a wine that has to spend a min of 4 years, max of 6, in the barrel, so it's not directly comparable with a vintage wine. Time will tell how this will evolve.
M: It seems like such an interesting time in the evolution of the port industry, so much seems poised in transition...the concept of vintage, younger blenders, etc...Do you think that makes traditionalists nervous?
C: Well, I consider myself to be a traditionalist, and I'm not in the least bit nervous. It is true that with vintage port we have something quite unique; it's one of the principle reasons why the port industry has survived so well for so long. Although it represents a fairly small proportion of our production, we've got a flagship wine which is generally recognized by most wine lovers as one of the great wines of the world, and it keeps port on the map.
It is extremely important and I think that any changes made to the concept of vintage port must be made with extreme caution...it can be debated a lot but extreme caution is necessary. I'm not nervous about it, because I think that we will always have the possibility of making great wines in great years. I tend to be rather optimistic about things in port wine. What is happening in the vineyards is encouraging...Everywhere people are replanting. We're doing an enormous amount here; we're replanting 1/3 of the vineyard. That's perhaps an unusually radical commitment to it. But the long term result I think will be enormous...
The world demand for vintage port is going up; indeed, I think there's a shortage. And it can only continue to go up, as people in the Far East discover it. America has discovered it; more & more people discover it there all the time. [Replanting programs of noble varieties] mean that in future years, production can rise to meet that demand, w/o any compromise of quality; rather the reverse, you're going to see quality will rise as well. It's not a time to be nervous; it's a time to be optimistic.
M: Some critics fear that port makers will adapt to the America predilection for young vintage port, and will start making a more readily accessible, grapier style that speaks to that demand. Do you think that's happening, and what is your general response to what some people feel is infanticide, glugging vintage ports when they're in their wee years of their existence.
C: I'm glad when anyone drinks vintage port, wherever and however they do it! I certainly think that a great bottle of vintage port is much better if you give it time & allow it to reach its maturity. But we're well aware that doesn't always happen. I don't believe in dictating to the customer how they should enjoy it. But what we make is a wine that has a potential to age a very long time and to develp and become better and better. What we have in mind when we make it, is a consumer who will buy it young and age it, or buy it when it's mature. We will carry on making port that is designed to mature...I certainly don't believe in knocking anybody who wants to drink it earlier. If you taste the '94, it's a great big wine that is going to last a very long time. We're committed to that.
C: Mildew and oidium are the principle enemies we have in our vineyards.
M: When you heard about the job here opening up, had you visted QdN before?
C: No, I'd never been to Portugal. My first view of Portugal was from the terrace of QdN. I arrived here by car in the middle of the night and slept in Noval on my own. The house was empty; there was no furniture in it. I was still only a candidate for the job, so they just put me in it; I was camping in this empty house. The next morning, I woke up and saw this view and thought, 'this is all right.' It was a very nice way to start. I was pretty keen on it right from the beginning. Just had a funny feeling that I was going to stay.
Somebody has said that there's as much wall in the Douro as there is in the Great Wall of China. That's one of those statements that is completely impossible to test. But anyway, it's a comparable human achievement, I think. Over there you can just see the mortorios-the "dead" terraces- it's very hard to get about, and you realize that's what it was all like at first. The people must have had a very contrary spirit to come to a place like this, so inhospitable, so difficult to move about, and think, 'we're going to make a vineyard out of it.'
It is very moving; moving when you see them abandoned, and moving when you see them still here.
The soil is rock underneath; schistous rock is in vertical formation here which makes it all possible-it normally forms horizontally, but some cataclysm must have happened here that turned it all on its side. The vertical formation means that the roots can go down between the little layers of rock looking for water. If the rock layers were horizontal, you couldn't have vineyards here at all because they have to be able to go down very deep to get water. Last year we didn't have a drop of rain from the first of May to the first of September; unless you have vines that have got very deep roots, they wouldn't be able to take it.
It's difficult to define in the Douro how many hectares you've got. I would say we have between 70 and 80 hectares. It's as vague as that, because really how do you define a hectare in the Douro, with patamares and all that. Now they're doing a satellite survey and will be defining the hectares of vineyard according to the flat surface that's got vines on it.
M: Now, is the replanting that you're doing under the World Bank scheme?
C: No, what was done before was, but the World Bank scheme really happened 8 or 9 years ago,which is why you see so many patamares in the Douro that are about that age. The problem with the whole scheme was that they gave everyone an interest holiday...so it was an enormous temptation for everybody...so you had a lot of replanting in the Douro which is a very good thing..with the right varieties and all that.
But the problem was then, farmers are not accountants and they sort of forgot that seven years later, they would have to start to repay the principal. There are a lot of small farmers who are in serious crisis at the moment, because the repayments have started. There was such a crisis that then the government intervened and set a moratorium, with 3 more years grace before starting to pay. The period of repayment coincided with the end of a period of rather deep crisis for the Douro anyway, so everyone was broke.
It's a fundamental principle of any government or EU grant now that no new planting is necessary in Europe; they don't want the area under vine to increase. But you can get help on projects that are designed to increase the quality, not quantity-replanting.
M: What do you think of efforts to increase the production of TN thru clonal seclection?
C: Well, I think that it might be very interesting, because TN is very variable...some years it gives decent yield; some years it just doesn't. I would like to see far more TN planted in our own vineyards for a start. I think it's an interesting idea, yes.
M: What do you consider the life expectancy of your vines.
C: I think it can be up to 100 years. There is a question of productivity that comes into it. It depends whether the quality is sufficient to offset the decrease in quantity.
Almost all the replanting we're doing here is in the traditional terraces, so perhaps 60 or 70 years. The most exciting thing about the work we're doing here is that it will go on producing results for a very long time. For the next 70 years, someone will be making port with the grapes coming from here, and it could be a vintage port that will age for another 50 years after that.
M: With the pataamares, is there any problem created by the fact that foliage tends to grow out the side of them?
C: We treat that with a kind of herbicide that neutralizes itself instantly upon contact with the earth. We just spray the sides of the patamares. If you let the weeds grow in abundance, they do steal from the vines. So it makes a bit too much competition. With a wall, you don't get that. There are people who just let it grow. But we don't; Taylor's doesn't.
M: Is there still quite a bit of cooperation between growers on viticultural research, and so forth?
C: Yes, particularily among the better ones. For example, Taylor's and Fonsecca have been extremely open and helpful. Our viticulturalists quite often go to se them, and theirs come to us to see what we're doing. I think it's a very positive thing, because it helps both sides and helps to improve things in general.
M: Do you think that kind of cooperation is special to the port industry?
C: Oh no, in Bordeaux, for example, you also se it a lot. I think that generally speaking when people are serious about making something very good, they tend to get on well with people who are trying to do the same thing. You can characterize things here by saying that on the production side, there's a lot of openness and cooperation and on the commercial side, everybody's out there fighting-which is normal and how it should be, and there's no hard feelings about that.
There's a strange thing where you have that great cooperation on the techinical side, and quite strong competition on the commercial side, but we all maanage to remain friends.
I live in the vineyards about half the time, maybe more now, since so much of Noval has moved to the Douro, and the rest of the time in Porto, where the office is.
This little robot is quite exciting. It pushes along very easily on these rollers. One person can pull and along it goes. It means one person can tread a lagare. Whereas with people, four hours is about maximimum, with this thing, it works on compressed air-what costs is to buy it-but air isn't expensive, and you can just keep it working the whole time....if you want to do some extracting in this lagare, and you want to put 24 people in the lagare from midnight to 6 am, it'll cost you a fortune and they'll complain, whereas with this, you just put one person in the lagare and they'll just keep doing it. So it gives us enormous flexibility and definitely improves the quality of what we're doing in the lagares. The important thing about it is that it ensures that port can be made in lagares over the long period.
Labor is becoming more & more expensive in Portugal-which is only right, by the way-but it is a problem for us from a practical point of view. Not only is it expensive, but you have a hard time getting it. If you don't have enough people in the lagare, you don't get the same result.
[Tasting]
C: Colheitas have a claim to be considered the other great wine of the Douro. They're much...well, I can't say underrated, because they're not rated at all...most people just don't know anything about them. They're much ignored. They are, can be, superb wines. There's a huge increase of interest in these wines in America.
I'm actually hoping to go to Japan this year or next year, to do a tasting, or a couple, aimed at sommeliers and high-class wine shops and I'm going to show them quite a few of these wines. As they're discovering port to a greater extent, I think that they'll have an open mind about these wines, and they'll judge them just on the taste. I find that anyone who tastes these wines ends up liking them.
I'm amazed at how much Japanese sommeliers know, given the tiny size of their market. There's a lady sommelier named Sakai, and she's absolutely brilliant. She once guessed the vintage of a port, even when she'd never had it before. Quite impressive.
My distributor is Tomen Corporation; so far they haven't actually been very brilliant, in the sense that I hardly sell any port at all in Japan. But they've just decided to reorganize their fine wine division, as far as they've got one at all. In conjunction with their reorganization, I'd like to go out an do a tasting. It's very difficult to get them very interested. They mainly buy Ruby. Our Ruby's very good, but I know where it goes-they use it for cooking, and they could use Sandeman's for that. What happens really is that I spend a lot of time educating Japanese sommeliers here, and then they go back, and say, why can't we get your wines in our restaurant? So it doesn't really do much good.
You've got a range of Colheitas here going from 1984 back to 1937, which is quite interesting, because you can see the evolution of the wine in the wood.
.....[tasting].....
I think we've got a really very good Ruby. They don't have the year of bottling on them; we actually have a little code on the back that means something to us, but no one else. It's quite complicated. These are all very recent.
The Ruby has the peppery thing if that's what you like.
Tawnies, tell me the worst.
M: Well, I particularily enjoyed both the 20 year and 40 year. The forty was my favorite in the tawnies, it was just scrumptious.
C: I like the 40. It's a very special wine. What's very difficult with the old tawnies is to capture all the complexity that you get from ageing without the wine tasting old. To keep a little of the freshness and fruit. And I think you get that with the 40, and also the 20. I'd like to hear what you think about the 10 year-old as well, even if it's awful.
M: I liked it as well, but it had a grapier quality to it. Let's see, I said...almost an apricot tone to it. Bill: Tannins coming slowly out.
C: I think that the 10 year-old is a fine 10 year-old, but it's true, both the 20 & the 40 are more exceptional. They both regularly come out at the top in tawny port tastings, which the 10 year old doesn't. I don't think that one could actually claim that it's the best 10 year old around. I'd be quite happy stand up in the marketplace and say that we've got the best 40 year old around, and I'd be reasonably comfortable with the 20 year old. They're very interesting.
B: I prefered the 20. If I were just going to sit and read a book, then maybe I'd take the 40.
C: Well, they're both quite good for that, I can testify...We had a tasting of all our wines by Robert Parker recently, and he gave us a very, very nice write-up of almost all the wines. The one thing that slightly disappointed me was that he didn't seem to go for the 40 year-old, he singled out the 20-year old. With the 40 year-old, he just said, "This style is a bit old for me. Some people like these old tawnies, but I just find them too old. Which I think is true of alot of 40 year olds, but not of ours. It doesn't taste old.
M: No, it doesn't. In fact, I find it long and rich. In fact, what I liked in the 20 is more intense, almost one step deeper in with the 40.
C: Yep. But there are many people who say that 20 is the ideal age.
M: Well, at some point, you reach the issue of personal palate preferences, and Robert Parker certainly has a distinct set of palate preferences.
C: I can't complain about that since he seems to like what we do, which is very nice. I also did a tasting for him of all the colheitas and he went for them.
B: Was that published?
C: Yeah, it was in his newsletter last October. He gave most of the wines 90 or more, so I was quite pleased. So colheitas...
M: Well, I am curious to see whether Bill and I have the same perceptions. I tasted them in groups, so I'll start with the first three. I don't know whether you'll find this odd or not, but actually my favorite was the '84.
C: '84 is lovely. It's one of my favorites, I agree. Older doesn't necessarily mean better. I think that the '84 is perfect, right now, and it's a true bargain, as well, it isn't very expensive. And believe it or not, when I go home to Porto, I drink it. When I drink it at home, I actually buy it from the company (laughs). I do give myself a reasonable price; it's just to maintain a certain discipline. I had 24 half bottles at home and there are now 18 left and that was not very long ago. I have it in half bottles, and it's absolutely wonderful for during the week if you want a glass of port after dinner, it's just great.
M: It has a lively, spicy pepperiness to it that I really like. The '81 was more smooth, velvety, more buttery to me.
C: Of the three '70s, what was your order of preference?
M: Let's see, in order of preference...my favorite was the '71.
C: Yeah, I think that's the best one.
M: It was just lovely. I wrote down: dates, figs, butterscotch, long, beautifully-balanced, spicy finish. I really enjoyed it.
C: Yeah, for me, the order is '71, '76, '74. '76 is very rich and luscious but it hasn't got quite the structure. '71 will age much longer. What did you think?
B: No noticeable preference. I really liked the 2 extremes, the '37 and the '84.
Wel,, the one to go for if you're paying for it is the '84. [laughter]
M: Well, I love the '37 also, but...
C: '64 I didn't think was showing very well today. It's unusual; it's not normally like that-it seemed to have a little too much acidity.
B: It's certainly very bright in the nose.
M:The '76 seemed to have less texture; it's very velvety, but didn't have the texture that some of the others do.
C: Yeah.
B: You were talking about the problems of marketing tawny and having supplies; don't these canibalize from the tawny programs?
C: Not at all, because what you do is set aside, for example, 25 barrels of wine for '94 colheita, and you just put them in a corner and forget about them. Not forget about them; you have to keep looking at them, but forget about them from a sales point of view. You're not allowed to touch them for the first 7 years, and I don't in fact bottle colheitas until they're ten years old, because I've got so many old ones that there's no point in selling them [the younger ones]. And I'm just about to start on the '87 for example.
They don't really cannibalize, because it's such a tiny quantity, only 25 barrels, when we make 1700 barrels a year. So if you set aside 20, you can just forget about it, figuratively-- we have to rack them every year...but that volume doesn't affect our program. The thing is that when you set aside the 20 barrels for colheitas and you declare it to the Port Wine Institute, and they open a current account for you...and every time you sell one bottle, they reduce your current account by that bottle. It's quite agood thing in a way, but it's incredibly bureaucratic, and there's alot of administration involved. But it means that when you've sold your '71 colheita, you can't suddenly make any more, which is a good thing, because the temptation would be there perhaps. Not for us, of course but...[laughs].
B: Kind of blend one up...[laughs]
C: It's very good, because it's very strictly controlled and it means that '71 colheita is '71 colheita, and that's a good thing. But it does mean that in terms of planning it's really tough to plan the sales the way you can with the ten & twenty-year olds. If I suddenly get orders from America for lots and lots of '71-which I did-Robert Parker gave it a 92, and said this is jolly nice...it just goes and unfortunately, when it's gone, it's gone. I've still got some, but I think with current sales, I won't have for very much longer. But the wine has to sell out sometime.
B: So these are bottled after ten years?
C: No, that's the time when we start to sell them, but...these are all cask samples by the way...if you find a bottle of colheita '71 in a shop, very unlikely, but if you do, it will have been bottled this year. So the idea of the colheitas is that we age them in barrels, and more or less until someone orders them, and then we put them in bottles, and out they go. And with a case of something like the '37, it's practically bottled by hand, because we hardly ever sell it; we sell a few cases a year. And we haven't got much. That's part of the fun of colheitas; you know that if you place an order for a case of '37, it's sitting in barrel, and someone will go and draw off 12 bottles and bottle it for you. And you always have the date of bottling on a colheita, and the date of harvest, so you know exactly how long it's been in barrel.
They're wines that are not actually destined to age in bottle. But they can do. Nierport, apart from Noval, is the other port house that has a fantastic range of colheitas, and they do all sorts of experiments, where they bottle the wine & keep it for 20 years in the bottle and see how they get on. And they can be wonderful. A lot of people say, if you read a book about port, for example, that colheitas do not age in bottle. That's the sort of pronouncement that no one should be allowed to make. Because of course anything ages in the bottle. You might say, it doesn't develop in the bottle, but of course it develops. Everything develops. It's alive, it's a living thing, It develops.
It's true to say that these are wines destined to be drunk now. The idea of them is that they age in the barrel, we bottle it, sell it, and somones drinks it. That's what they're for. But if you buy six bottles of a colheita, and drnak one now, eaving the other five in your cellar for a year, and continued over a period of years, of course it would evolve. It's always quite slow, because it's already had so much ageing in the barrel before, but it evolves, of course it does. But that's not what the wine is for; that's not our idea of what a colheita. They age in a barrel and are supposed to be drunk now. But it doesn't do them any harm if you keep them, if they're good in the first place.
The thing about ageing old tawnies in the bottle is that if the wine had the slightest defect in the first place, which you might not see when it's young, with an old bottle of tawny, the defect comes out.
B: I was surprised-it's difficult in this light-but there didn't seem to be a big color variation.
C: There is. That's the problem with this room...but they do have some lovely colors and if you look at it in the right light, they start off looking reddish down here, and they go paler and paler up to about here, and start looking darker again. The '37 is actually much darker than any of these.What's happening is that the original coloring that came from the skins is dropping out, and then they then start pulling tannins out of the wood, and taking color out of the wood. You get a different color. The color of this '37 is absolutely beautiful, all sorts of greens and golds.
M: It's interesting that it takes on a greenish caste.
C: I think it's lovely.
B: So how do you market these? You say you're custom-bottling, but is that from individual consumers? Do orders come from distributors?
C: We have an independent distributor in every country, all autonomous. In America, we have William Brown whiskey, with a fine wine division that does very well. In England, I have someone called Paradigm, a joint venture between Veuve Clicqot and Moutin-Rothschild. In France, it's a joint venture between Veuve-Clicquot and United Distillers. So basically, what we do is get on the back of a big, high quality brand that's got a network of distribution and wants another premium, high quality wine to go with it. And there are one or two countries where we've got someone very small, because sometimes that works really well. Because sometimes if you're with a very big company-say White Horse whiskey-the salesman can sell a pallet of WH whiskey for every case he sells of port, so he's not going to talk about it much. But if I'm with a small distributor, Noval might be the most important thing he's got going in his portfolio and he'll do a lot of work for you.
M: Could you give me your assessment of the current regulatory system for port...the Casa do Douro is still playing a major role in the institutional regulation of the port industry. Is the situation as it stands now a satisfactory solution? Do you think things are functioning well, is there room for improvement?
C: Well, we live in an imperfect world, and I don't think that there are such things as satisfactory solutions, just compromises. And I think that this is one of them. It's a great improvement on what existed before, and a step in the right direction. This comes under the heading of politics, as much as port wine, and I tend to steer clear of politics and just concentrate on making port wine. I know that sounds like a get-out, but it really is true. I find that the best thing to do is just concentrate on Noval, making the best wine that we possibly can, and getting out there and promoting it. And I don't actually spend a great deal of time on the political side of the port industry. So I'm not the right one to ask for a real comment. Some people are; some people absolutely love it. Not me.
(c) Copyright Melanie Campbell Drane, 1997