Personalities

The only chance for vintage port
«Magnum» №1-2 (23) 2008

After a two-day historic tasting of vintage Croft and Taylor’s with vintages spanning for over a century, Eleonora Scholes spoke to David Guimaraens, chief winemaker of The Fladgate Partnership holding that owns these prestigious brands.

– What was extraordinary about these tastings for me is the responsibility that we currently hold. The ports that we bottle today will be tasted and compared in 20, 30, 100-year’s time. With vintage port we have one opportunity per year to get it right. Once it is bottled, there is no going back. During the two tastings every single wine had its own story. With every glass we were tasting I was always thinking about the vineyard that I am working with, the way that we are making port and I was trying to stimulate the ideas for what I have to do to make sure that this very distinctive style is kept and that in 20, 50, 100 years’ time ports that are made tomorrow will be like some of the great wines that we tasted today.

– There are two particular characteristics that make Taylor’s vintage very distinctive. One is very distinctive, elegant floral aromas. The other characteristic is a tremendous flavour background. When we compared the tastings of Croft and Taylor’s, what stood out at the Taylor’s was an incredible structure. Even the oldest port, the 1900, was so full of life and had a very distinctive tannin. The style and the firmness of the tannin is very distinctive and it is kept even today when a lot of changes are going on in the region and in wine in general. We want to ensure that we don’t lose that character.

– My personal involvement, in essence, started when I was born. My family founded Fonseca back in 1822. Since 1948, my family’s history continues with The Fladgate Partnership. My personal first experience in the wine world was when I was 8 years old when my father took me out of school during the harvest time to one of the company’s quintas. In fact it was Taylor’s Quinta Terra Feita where I was left during the two-week harvest period. It was magnificent. I enjoyed it so much that the following years I repeated the experience until I was sent to England to a boarding school. That experience left a very big mark on me.

– That was my first feeling for it. It is important to understand that in the port trade we have these very particular characteristics. We have lodges, where we age our ports and where we have our offices. They are apart from where we have our vineyards. We are talking about 2 hours of travel between our lodges and our vineyards. So the trip to the vineyards has always been special and that is something that left a big mark on all of us, and certainly myself in my early days.

– It is important to understand is that we have a business where we’ve been making vintage port for several generations. So myself as the person in charge of this generation’s winemaking, I have to make sure that the know-how that is in-built, be it in the vineyards or the winemaking, is maintained. Vintage port is very much about the best wines in a very good year from a very small selection of our vineyards. In effect, they’ve got to be perfect ports with a tremendous intensity of colour, of tannin, of structure, but all in harmony with each other. And it is those ports which then will have the capacity to be bottled and to age for lifetime in the bottle.

– To understand port today, you have to understand that our vineyards are probably in one of the most difficult growing regions in the world. They are mountain vineyards. Traditional plantings were very labour intensive. Over the last 30 years we had to redesign our vineyards to be able to overcome the difficulty, the hardship of the work. And that has been done with a tremendous success. However during that period we had to do it in such a way that we don’t lose the greatness of the old vineyards. We did it gradually so that the young vineyards had the time to mature and develop. At the moment we are now talking about vineyards which were replanted 20-30 years ago and now have the same behaviour as those old vineyards.

In terms of winemaking, there are also some peculiarities. Today vintage ports are still foot trodden — in the same way as all of the ports that we tasted today back to 1900 were made. Having said that, only two or four percent of port today is foot trodden. We have reserved the privilege for our vintage ports, but in the meantime we had to design modern fermentation technology to come up with an alternative. That was done very successfully. We have our own port fermenter which replicates the characteristics of traditional foot treading. Now that we have achieved that we are ready to look to the future.

– I think that above all else a winemaker has got to be a viticulturist. A winemaker who doesn’t understand viticulture will not make great wines. Our old vineyards had all of the varieties mixed in randomly. Today we separate vineyards so we have more control into individual needs of each grape variety. However, we respect tradition by blending grape varieties in a fermentation tank. That is an example where modern techniques have given us more control. But we don’t lose the greatness by blending back together — in a way that we decide what combination’s put together. That has been very important.

In terms of the winemaking technology itself in relation to vintage port, I think this is where at the moment least has changed. Tools such as refrigeration or heating are there, but they may also be very dangerous because you can interfere too much. Above all else, the most dramatic changes occurred in the viticulture. The changes in winemaking have been dramatic in other styles other than vintage. I think for vintage at the moment we are looking at bringing technology which reduces foot treading from a hundred percent to 30 or 40 percent without sacrificing one bit of the quality.

– I think the word dangerous is most appropriate. There is a danger that if winemaking interferes too much we can destroy the house style. It is important to understand that vintage port is a reflection of the year and of the vineyards where it comes from. The winemaker’s responsibility is to take those grapes and produce them in such a way that they will show the characteristics of the vineyard. The quality will be a result of the year. If you have too much interfering, style can wander in all directions. So the winemaker’s responsibility is to maintain a way of making the port which has been consistent over the years. He should not be scared of changing, but when you do change, you’ve got to know what you are changing. You’ve also got to change it in such a way that you don’t lose the fundamental characteristics which make a vintage port from Taylor’s today have the same characteristics as the 1927 that we tasted.

– I think vintage is a category of port that will stay around for the longest and that will be the most recognized. There are several reasons. One is that there are not many wines in the world which after two years of making and subsequent bottling have a capacity to live for a lifetime in the bottle. Even with table wines it is rare that in a tasting of 80-year-old wines many would be drinkable. That is not the case with port. And like all great wines, vintage port is the very best of all of the port that is made and for that it has got to be a very good example of a very-well made wine where you have intensity of fruit, intensity of colour, an incredible harmony. People know about vintage port in other wine regions of the world, be it Bordeaux or Australia. When people think of great wines of the world, best whites are associated with Burgundy and Alsace, best reds — with Bordeaux and Burgundy, best fortified wines — with vintage port. It deserves its place. We also have another particularity. Port trade declares, distinguishes the great years. Whenever we declare a classic vintage, there is always a lot of interest shown by collectors, by the wine press. Everybody wants to have a chance of evaluating the latest release. When you see that over the last century we have never declared more than three years in a decade, the interest seems even keener. We have a very good wine which is a natural accompaniment in the end of the meal, which creates a following and an expectation, as well as a great excitement.