Port Side

PORT
SIDE
One of the world’s newest, and best,
winemaking regions is actually one of the
world’s oldest.
BY ALEXANDER LOBRANO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIA VANDENOEVER
PORTUGAL
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THE DOURO BOYS
Left to right, João
Alvares Ribeiro, Miguel
Roquette, Francisco
Olazabal, Dirk Niepoort,
Francisco Ferreira and
Cristiano van Zeller at
Quinta do Vallado.
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PORT
SIDE
UNLIKELY REVOLUTIONARIES
(Clockwise from left) Von
Zeller; Niepoort at Quinta do
Vallado; Inside the wine lab at
Quinta Vale Dona Maria.
SPA I N
QUINTA DO
VALLADO
PORTO
QUINTA DO
CRASTO
ALTO
DOURO
VER
O RI
R
U
DO
NIEPOORT
PESO DA
RÉGUA
DOURO
VALLEY
O
U
R
R
I
V
E
R
POR T U GA L
O
representative of the full range of activities associated
with winemaking—terraces, quintas [wine-producing farm
complexes], villages, chapels and roads.” More simply said,
the visual harmony of this countryside quietly exalts with
its aura of peaceable permanence. Staring out over such
well-groomed and -tended vineyards is profoundly soothing,
too. Subliminally, they convey a gentle definition of eternity
based on a profound respect for nature transmitted from one
generation to the next. There have been vineyards here since
almost the founding of the Roman Empire.
This bucolic backdrop makes for an unlikely setting for a
revolution, but during the last 30 years a wave of change has
jolted the valley’s conservative and genteel traditions of Port
production. The bold band of winemakers who launched the
charge still leads it. They came together in 2003 and christened
themselves “the Douro Boys.” Their shared goal was to put the
unfortified wines of the Douro on an equal footing with Port.
The wines had the pedigree to achieve a level of recognition
appropriate to their inherent quality. And they have. Today the
region is rebooted; the Douro’s unfortified wines are on par with
the best vintages of Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Piedmont and
other storied Old World wine lands.
D
N
o landscape in the world expresses the idea
of mind over matter more powerfully and
poignantly than northern Portugal’s Douro River
Valley. Over the course of centuries, human
grit, gumption and genius have completely
transformed the valley’s almost-vertical hills of gnarled
schist into terraced vineyards. Humans have massaged the
hills’ coarse granite and slate soils into yielding the wines
used to make the region’s signature product, Port. Port is the
most storied of fortified wines, which differ from standard
wines because a grape spirit, or brandy, is added during the
production process. Adding the spirit during, and not after,
fermentation kills off the active yeast cells and leaves the wine
with high levels of residual sugar, making it sweet and strong
in alcohol—Port’s special character.
In 2001, UNESCO recognized the uniqueness of these
landscapes when it classified the Alto (upper) Douro
Valley as a World Heritage site. UNESCO specified that
the upper valley constitutes “an outstanding example
of a traditional European wine-producing region” that’s
been growing grapes for over 2,000 years. The group also
noted, “The components of the Alto Douro landscape are
ATL ANT IC
OC EAN
AMONG FRIENDS
Ribeiro, right, shares
a glass of Quinta do
Vallado wine with
Serreira on a terrace
at the winery.
SPA I N
QUINTA
VALE
DONA MARIA
QUINTA DO
VALE MEÃO
POR T UGAL
10 MILES
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PORT
SIDE
IT STARTS WITH
THE GRAPES
For centuries, the
Douro’s grapes made
some of the world’s
best fortified wine;
fruit from some of the
same vines, including
these at Quinta do
Vallado, now makes
highly rated wine.
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
Porto sits at the mouth of
the Douro River where it
meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Consider that wines from one or more of the Douro’s quintas
have made it onto Wine Spectator’s “Top 100 Wines of the Year”
list every year for over a decade. This feat casts them as rivals
of the Pauillacs, Gevrey-Chambertins, Châteauneuf-du-Papes
and Barolos. The highest Douro Valley unfortified wine score to
date? Wine Spectator rated a 2011 vintage Quinta do Vale Meão
97/100. From the magazine’s tasting notes: “A lush, seductive
red, filled to the brim with an array of dark fruit and kirsch
flavors, accented by plenty of cream and spice notes. Silky
tannins and molten chocolate hints add richness. The long
finish echoes with mineral and white pepper details. Best from
2015 through 2022.”
During the recent week I spent among the Douro Boys—men,
really—as a fledgling but eager student of Douro Valley wines,
I’ve never met a more passionate, worldly-but-earthy and
intelligently innovative group of winemakers. Each one taught
me something different about the essential character of Douro
wines. All of them exemplified the same consistent elegance,
charm and graciousness as the superb quaffs I sampled.
The “Boys” are a convivial group of cousins, brothers and
friends, and did not jump into winemaking on a whim. Between
them, they represent five of the most respected wine estates
in the Douro—Quinta do Vallado (Francisco Ferreira and
João Alvares Ribeiro), Niepoort (Dirk Niepoort), Quinta do
Crasto (Miguel and Tomás Roquette), Quinta Vale Dona Maria
(Cristiano van Zeller) and Quinta do Vale Meão (Francisco
Olazabal). Although descended from some of the most famous
Port-making families in the region, none of these men find
their ardor for making unfortified wine incongruous with their
families’ history. “Innovation is actually very much a part of
our heritage,” observed the amiable Cristiano van Zeller when
I visited him at Quinta Vale Dona Maria, where he makes wine
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from 50-year-old vines on property that has been in his wife’s
family for 150 years. The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker said
of the Quinta do Vale D. Maria 2009, “It will be a contender for
wine of the vintage” and rated it 96 points.
“From generation to generation, we have been documenting
every single square foot of this valley, because even if they
are just a few feet apart, different parcels of land can produce
wholly different wines,” van Zeller said. “This is why we have to
mix and match different barrels from different plots to get the
right balance in a wine.”
“Everything changed in 1986 when Portugal joined the European
Union,” explained Carlos Raposo, the brilliant young cellar
master who oversees production as part of his collaboration
with winemaker Dirk Niepoort at the latter’s Quinta de Napoles
vineyards. The EU abolished the monopoly that funneled Ports
produced in the Douro region to the big Port houses that blended,
matured and marketed them from their cellars in Vila Nova de
Gaia across the river from Porto. “Wine producers were finally
able to bypass the houses founded by the English and Dutch Port
merchants and were free to sell independently,” Raposo said.
To appreciate the magnitude of this change, it helps to know a
little bit about the history of winemaking in the valley of the Douro
River, which originates at Picos de Urbión in Spain and then
flows 557 miles west across northern Portugal before reaching
the Atlantic Ocean at Porto. Archaeological evidence indicates
wine has been made in the upper valley since the Bronze Age some
3,000 years ago, but the region’s vineyards really thrived when
Portugal became part of the wine-loving Roman Empire in the 3rd
century B.C. What sealed the fate of the Douro as a producer of
fortified wine for centuries was a series of treaties signed between
England and Portugal that gave Portugal privileged access to the
lucrative British market.
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PORT
SIDE
VALLEY VIEWS
(Clockwise from top)
Porto, on the Douro
River; Olazabal
surveys his family’s
vineyards; Niepoort
checking in on wine;
Tasting at Quinta
do Vale Meão; Old
Niepoort bottles;
Vineyards at Quinta
do Crasto.
ROOTED IN HISTORY
(Clockwise from top)
Vale d. Maria; Terraces
at Quinta do Vallado;
Historic Niepoort Ports;
João Paulo Martin is one
of Portugal’s foremost
writers on wine.
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ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
(This page; left to right)
Francisco Olazabal from
Quinta do Vale Meão.
Quinta do Crasto’s Miguel
Roquette. (Opposite page)
Dirk Niepoort driving
around his winery.
The 1703 Methuen Treaty put Portugal on a preferential basis
in supplying Britain through lower tariffs on wines from Portugal
than those from other countries. After a quality scandal in the
region in the early 1700s caused Port sales to plummet, the
Marquis de Pombal, a Portuguese nobleman, founded the now
legendary Douro Wine Company to regulate the Port trade. The
company, for the first time, officially delineated those regions
of the valley that had the legal right to call their fortified wine
“Port.” (The Douro is one of the three oldest established wine
appellations in the world.) The thriving commerce between
England and Portugal led to the establishment of a community
of English and other European wine brokers in Porto, and the
founding of the great Port houses, which enjoyed a monopoly
some winemakers describe as quasi-feudal with the quinta
producers until 1986.
“In 1987, when Dirk told his father that he wanted to buy the
70-acre Quinta de Napoles and begin producing wine, the
older gentleman first thought his son had taken leave of his
senses, but eventually he came around,” explained Raposo.
“After several years of hard work, Dirk’s Redoma wines
showed everyone the incredible potential of the Douro to
produce unfortified white wine, which surprised everyone,
because almost none had been made here in the past—the
Douro was considered red-wine territory par excellence.
Niepoort whites are made with local varietals like rabigato,
codega do larinho and viosinho. These grapes come from very
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old vineyards planted in mica schist soils at high altitudes,
which yield delicate mineral-rich wines of great complexity.”
It isn’t just the grapes and terroir, the French idea of a very
specific geographical place. “We still work according to
traditional methods, including crushing the grapes by foot in
large, open, waist-high stone tanks called lagares,” said Raposo,
who worked at wineries around the world before joining the
Niepoort winery. “The reason we work this way is the foot
never crushes the grape pips [seeds], releasing bitter oils the
way that mechanical presses do, and the granite used to make
the lagares gives the wine more character, too.”
On a chilly autumn afternoon, a fire crackled in the fireplace
of the elegant dining room at Quinta do Vale Meão. August
oil paintings on the walls and silver-framed family portraits
on the sideboards brought generations of family to the table
even though today’s owner, Francisco Olazabal, entertained a
single guest—me—for lunch. The meal began with a soothing
country soup made from potatoes, stock and turnip greens.
A main course of braised partridge hunted by the host in the
surrounding hills followed. The succulent bird was served
with a Quinta do Vale Meão 2013, an elegant red wine made
from touriga nacional, touriga franca, tinta barroca and tinta
roriz grapes grown on the estate. “This wine shows off the
best elements of New and Old World style. You’ll find it’s fullbodied and fresh without any cloying jaminess,” said Olazabal,
and he was right.
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For the Douro, Olazabal’s estate is relatively recent. The 650acre quinta was founded in 1877 by Antónia Adelaide Ferreira,
his great-great grandmother. “She was from the Ferreira Port
family, and her plan was to create a model vineyard. Almost
all of the grapes grown here were sold to Ferreira to make Port
until 1998, when my father resigned as director of Ferreira to
dedicate himself to producing great still [unfortified] wines on
the estate,” Olazabal said. “My great-great grandmother was
sort of a visionary,” he added, explaining that the quinta lies
on a geological fault with two distinctly different soil types:
schist in front of the house and granite out back. “She knew
this, and by buying this land she gave us great tools, because
different grapes prefer different soils,” he said.
“We’re quite different from other Douro producers, because
our vineyards are young and vinified according to individual
parcels and then blended,” Olazabal told me while we visited
his recently renovated aging cellars, where the air smelled
deliciously of dried red fruit, especially cherries. “The real
genius of the new Douro wines is that they can present such a
strong sense of terroir but also be discreetly modern.”
While Olazabal maintains individual parcels of varietals,
the other Douro estates still use the traditional local “field
blend” system of grape growing. In this, different varieties
are planted in a single parcel and picked at the same time.
“These parcels are so precious that we have catalogued every
single vine in case we need to replant. There are some dozen
different grape varieties in those parcels, and together they
make magic,” Miguel Roquette told me as we stared out over
the vineyards that produce the grapes from which his family’s
most highly lauded wine, the Quinta do Crasto Vinha Maria
Teresa, is made. (Wine Spectator awarded the 2005 and 2011
vintages 96/100 and the 2007 vintage 95/100, while Robert
Parker rated the 2001 as 95/100, the 2003 as 96/100 and the
2005 as 94/100.) Until I actually tasted the 2005 vintage in a
Porto restaurant a few days later, the most interesting thing
about my visit to Roquette’s estate was botanical.
“Come, Alexander. It’s important that you see this. This will
THE TASTING TOUCH
Olazabal in his
tasting room, where
he samples various
grapes before starting
the blending process.
tell you more about what makes the Douro the Douro than
anything else,” Roquette said. I followed him into the dark
on a cool, autumn night with a fine sliver of a new moon in
the star-studded sky above. Using his cellphone, he lit the
way through the gardens outside of the family house on the
farm. “Here we are,” he said, shining the light on an amazingly
long, thick and gnarled slate gray root exposed in the side of
a snaggly cliff. “The vine that sent down that root is at least a
hundred feet above us on the hillside. Do you feel the power in
this root, the obstinacy of nature? This is the Douro, a harsh
place where the vines struggle but end up producing some of
the world’s best grapes, from which we’re now making some of
the world’s best wines,” said Roquette, sounding as awed as if
he were seeing the root for the first time.
This is why you might honestly say that the Douro is living
up to its name, since “douro” means “golden” in Portuguese,
and this wine region, at once venerable and brilliantly avantgarde, is clearly just on the cusp of a new golden age.
The Douro Boys run
a collective website
at douroboys.com.
The Douro Boy
estates regularly
open to the public
are Quinta do Vallado
(quintadovallado.com),
outside of the town
of Peso da Régua,
and Quinta do Crasto
(quintadocrasto.pt).
In Peso da Régua, the
restaurant Castas e
Pratos (castasepratos.
com) offers a superb
selection of Douro
wines by the glass.
Alexander Lobrano also writes for The New York Times. His last
piece for Inspirato was about Florentine guide Silvia Ponticelli.
Tamber Bey Vineyards embodies the philosophy that
great winemaking begins in the vineyard.
A Stunning Location
INSPIRATO RECOMMENDS
The winery is located at the Sundance Ranch in Calistoga,
TOUR: See how Portuguese
nobility lived at Casa de Mateus,
where the palace and its gardens
today look very much like they did
when first built in the first half of
the 18th century.
Douro Valley
CAPTION
TK HEREstay in suites at
Inspirato Members
(Clockwise
fromset
top,
the Six Senses,
inside a restored
left)
A roadsidemanor
fish house perched on a
19th-century
market;
Galpão
Caipira’s
hilltop with
sweeping
views.
boutique; Galpão
TO LEARN MORE
INSPIRATO’S DOURO
Caipira’s
cafe;ABOUT
Duvale
VALLEY SUITES,
TURN TO PAGE 141.
cachaçaria;
caiman
in Tijuca Lagoon;
Galpão Caipira’s spa.
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Helio Lima’s
picks
Concierge, Six
Senses Douro Valley
Meticulously Hand-Crafted Wines
FLOAT: Cruise the Douro River
on a sailboat or in a traditional
wooden rabelo boat, which used
to transport wine pipes from the
Douro to Porto.
EAT: Traditional Portuguese family
style cooking—simple ingredients
like cod fish, smoked pork and
tapas carefully prepared—rules at
Taberna do Jerere.
100
Whether you arrive by car or
boat at DOC Restaurant, go for
one of the sleek outside tables
overlooking the river.
religious, Holy Week in Portugal
is an extraordinary, mesmerizing
experience.
Mid February - Early March
ALMOND BLOSSOM ROUTE
The Alto Douro’s thousands of
blooming almond trees turn
hillsides white and pink.
May 15, 2016
DOURO VALLEY HALF(
MARATHON AND 6K
A flat, fast course through
vineyards and along the Douro
River starting at Barragem de
Bagaúste.
March 20-26, 2016
EASTER WEEK IN LAMEGO
Robed and hooded figures,
accompanied by the beat of
drums, process slowly behind
swaying life-sized religious
effigies—even for the non-
May 2016
CHERRY FESTIVAL
Enjoy the first of this season’s
harvest of the 3,500 tons of
cherries grown around Resende.
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An Experience Like No Other
Taste our wines, tour the winery, mingle with the horses
1251 Tubbs Lane Calistoga, CA 94515 | 707.942.2100 | www.tamberbey.com