Personalities

Man who brings up wine
«Vinnaya Karta» №1 (92) January-February 2008

Dirk Niepoort of the Niepoort port house is known as a current generation of a famous family dynasty as well as a winemaker who headed the quality table wines movement in the Douro Valley.

The enfant terrible — the name that was given to him by the press a long time ago, readily agreed for an interview for Vinnaya Karta. Staying true to his principles, Niepoort made several revealing statements about himself, his company and general winemaking situation in the Douro.

– Many things. I haven’t received a formal education so there are a lot of technical things that I don’t know. I could still learn a lot of things.

– I was recently talking to a young lady winemaker. She was desperate as the wines were no good. I said, “The most important thing for a winemaker to learn is to keep some distance from the wine and not interfere all the time”.

– I wouldn’t say relationship, but it’s a little bit like educating a child.

– It’s difficult to answer. The only nice thing my wife tells me is that I am a good father for my sons.

– It was our general manager who wrote it, not me. The most important thing for me is to make the best possible wine. I would call our mission, above all, understanding the Douro from a wine point of view. We could talk about port, but I think with port we understand the Douro pretty well. Our new perspective is to understand wine production in the Douro. I think that processes of making wine and port, as well their vineyards, are very different. What is best for wine is not necessarily best for port.

– Yes, it’s a very new thing. We have two thousand years of tradition of making bad wine, except for port. The most famous Portuguese wines used to be Barca Velha which was launched in the fifties and consistently remained a benchmark in Portugal and Quinta do Cotto which was first produced in the eighties. When I started to work in the wine business in 1987, there was really nothing notable apart from those two wines, so we had to re-invent the wheel. It is really important to understand that wine and port are two different things and we cannot assume the same logic for both.

– The main difference lies in vineyards. Traditional port vineyards mostly have southern exposures. They like excessive conditions — too much sun, too much dryness. That’s not the same case for wine. Vineyards for table wine need more even conditions, to keep more acidity in grapes. To make it simple, southern exposures are clearly better for port, and north-facing are better for wine.

– I don’t agree. I take the same approach, but in a different way. For instance, if we have over-ripeness, it is very important to take over-ripe grapes out. But we pick some higher vineyards at the same time and ferment everything together. It’s one of the ways to balance acidity and to lower alcohol. You have to understand what is really ripe, what is green, which vineyards work well with others and how they compensate.

– Yes. Don’t forget that our vineyards grow on altitudes between 80 and 800 meters. Traditionally high vineyards were never considered good. Of course, they are bad for port, but maybe they are good for wine. And I believe high vineyards are very good for wine, you just have to pick at a different time. In reality their ripening is more even. You get a lot of heat during the day you, but it’s cold in the nighttime. Acidity levels are kept much higher.

– The principle doesn’t change. There are some very high vineyards and you have to learn to pick them at the right time. What is good for port is not always good for wine. There is one variety called Malvasia Fina. It is very good for port, but we don’t like to work with Malvasia for red wines. However, there are other varieties which are equally good for port as well as for white wine. What we have to do is pick early and work with high altitude vineyards to achieve freshness in wines.

– Many more than you think. We have over 85 different varieties in the Douro alone. We are still trying to understand them and this is part of the process that I am telling you about. We know certain things for port, but we have to rethink things for wine. Grape varieties are an important factor. Instead of replanting everything with 5 varieties like everybody is doing at the moment we should stop, look at the old vineyards and try to understand them. Unfortunately, in the universities they throw everything that is very old, with two thousand years of history out, and invent new things. I think we should combine tradition and empiric knowledge with modern technology and modern experience.

– Today there is a fashion to plant Souzao. I want to think that I was the first person to have looked at Souzao and to have planted it. Although I don’t have much planted, it was me who talked about it and started making the movement. It’s an interesting variety, one of those grapes with red juice.

– Yes. Probably it would not be what it is today. I don’t think I invented it, I pushed it maybe. The Douro would probably have gone the same way, but it would have happened 10-20 years later. What makes the difference is groups of friends who get together, talk about wine and taste it. Not only me making something, but sharing bottles of wine — it helped everybody establish their own style. I think that by sitting and talking people think differently instead of the same.

– Yes. Usually people who come to universities do everything alike. I think that by talking and tasting other wines everyone starts wanting to do something in own way, so styles get diverse rather than unified.

– It’s a selling, a marketing tool somehow. I believe that it works only if quality is already present in the bottle. I would say that Douro boys have been making really good wines since 2001, not only the group boys, but all Douro. Before that there was an important moment when some people were doing much better than the others, but it was too experimental. From 2001 onwards it is more focused, though experiments continue. It gets better every year, with everybody, and in different directions. Douro Boys existed before, but informally. I think the group was born at the right time because we could show really good wines, and they are getting even better.

– Yes, a marketing move which puts people together and helps them talk. It’s always a good idea.

– It hasn’t increased. It was there. The difference is that maybe there was 0.1 percent that was really good and now there are 5 percent which are much better. It’s a big increase, but from a small base. I can’t tell you exactly how much, although I thought about it recently too.

– The division between ports and table wines is fifty by fifty. The share of wines grew quicker than I expected.

– Ports are the basis of the Douro, but I don think that wines and ports are enemies. We can use their synergy. It makes the Douro even stronger because it’s the only area in the world where we have two powerful products next to each other. I see it as a very positive and unique thing.

– It’s a long and difficult story. To make it short, port houses have been spending too much time and promotional efforts on selling, rather than promoting the port itself. There is no doubt that port is one of the best wines in the world, and the best ports are getting more and more popular. But they are in the minority. Those who do well are doing very well. On the down side, bigger houses are fighting each other with cheaper and cheaper prices in the basic categories. Instead of spending money to make the middle categories more important, they continue to lower prices in the lower categories. This is a sad and dangerous thing.

– I think it is an important step, but it is not as dramatic as it seems. The situation in the Douro is rather like in Champagne. Houses are buying vineyards, but they need to buy grapes from other growers. I don’t see a problem in that. I am not sure that the idea of you doing everything yourself is the best. It depends on a company structure. I can tell you that most of my best wines are made from bought in grapes. We have been buying some older vineyards recently and I prefer to have them under my control, but one of the great things about the Douro is that we still have a lot of old vineyards. This is one of the things that makes us very different from other parts of the world. In bigger companies (we are not big, but we have a structure) there is one way of doing things, but small growers may do them differently. They can afford to work with old vineyards because they do everything themselves. They are not doing badly because they don’t have a heavy structure to pay the bills.

– It isn’t difficult so far because most of my colleagues prefer young vineyards, and their priority lies with Touriga Nacional. But their views are changing and the old vineyards are becoming more popular which might be more difficult in future. Actually, this year we bought more grapes. One of the fears was if I would get the same quality, and in fact it was better than I expected.

– It’s finished, and it is working. We started in January and it was ready in August. It’s a miracle. Everything worked according to the plan and even better than we expected. We are really happy.

– There are three things. A winery should be well integrated in the environment so that it doesn’t shock the nature. It looks like nature needed our winery there. The building is very well insulated which is important to save energy. One of the luxurious things about the winery is there is space. It is not immense, but it is quite big. There are ways that you can access every point of the winery with a forklift. The rest is just practical. It should be noted that the winery was not made to save money. It was made to make the best possible wine. From our point of view it’s working really well. Another very special thing, along space, is that we work with very little tanks. If I have enough money, there will be installed first air conditioning powered by solar energy. We are working on it, and the winery is ready for it. At one stage the works were stopped because nobody helped me, but now I am restarting the process.

– Machines are of little importance. In our winemaking there is as little intervention as possible so the equipment has no importance. A destemmer should be very good, that’s one thing I am proud of. Several years ago when we were buying a destemmer, I was arguing with my winemaker why we needed this rolls-royce because it was very expensive. I never understood until I decided that I wanted to keep the berries whole and not to hurt them. I compared our machine to the one in another winery where I used to make wine as well. Then I found out that my machine was really good and of course worth the money. Basically, we have nothing special about our winemaking. We keep the grapes as untouched as possible, do as little extraction as possible and keep the wine as long as possible in the tank. All the winery operates by gravity.

– It is the wine you want to drink. I don’t believe there is a perfect wine. There are many great wines. One thing I look for is purity. I increasingly think that a great wine doesn’t have to be the most expensive one. It can be something that you feel fun to drink, something which makes you happy. Wine can be many things. That’s something what we are trying to do as well — to understand what the Douro can give us, what we want to do with it, and how we can fine tune it.

– The most difficult, the most challenging wine is Charme. Yet, the wine that impresses me most somehow is the first wine I made. It was a monster, everything was wrong about it, and yet you can drink it today and it’s fantastic. Again, it puts a lot of question marks about everything we do because everything we did then was wrong and yet the result is very good today. It makes you think.