Dear Readers, beginning Monday — or Sunday if I can manage — I’ll be posting from Asti, a central city in Piedmont, where I will
be attending the Barbera Meeting 2010 with a group of American wine bloggers. In addition to the festival or conference, we’ll be visiting prominent estates that produce the three “B” wines of Piedmont — Barbera, Barolo and Barbaresco — and eating some fine meals. There’s an official blog, of course.

I’ve traveled and tasted and dined in Tuscany, Umbria and the Veneto, but not Piedmont, so I’m looking forward to this trip a great deal, for the landscape, history and culture, for the wine and food, and for the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas, as well as japes, jests and jabs to the arm, with some fellow bloggers.

Until Monday, then, or Sunday, after a long flight to Amsterdam and then to Milan.

Readers may have been thinking, “So, F.K. went to the Douro Valley, and so far he has written about red table wines and white wines and eating cod innards, but what about Port, which is of course what the Douro is all about?”

Today we get to that, but first some history.

How Port Got Fortified

Trade between England and Portugal, which had been carried out profitably and peacefully since the 1400s, received a boost in 1689, when war between France and England cut off access to French wine. The hearty red wines of the Douro Valley represented an alternative; these were often shipped with a dollop of brandy added to the barrels to ensure their survival during storage and the sea voyage. In the early 18th Century, merchants discovered a monastery in the Douro where monks added brandy to the wine during fermentation, resulting in a wine that was powerful (“fortified”) and sweet, because the alcohol killed the yeast cells and left residual sugar in the wine. Thus was Port born and a whole area of manufacture and trade, long dominated by the English, established.

Nothing Is That Simple

It would take more space than we have to describe the intricacies of the history of Port and its making, and so let’s encapsulate.

>By the early 18th Century, Port was so popular in England that its manufacture had become corrupted though over-production and adulteration, leading to:

>The demarkation of the Douro and its best growing areas by the Marquis of Pombal in 1756.

>Ports were made upriver and than taken to Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from the city of Porto (Oporto) for storage in the manufacturers’ warehouses or lodges. The barrels were brought to the lodges on flat-bottomed barges. This practice was eventually codified into law, and shipping of Port from individual quintas upstream was forbidden, until Portugal’s entrance into the EU in 1986. Thereafter, quintas were allowed to by-pass Vila Nova de Gaia, and some quintas nowadays have no presence in that traditional site. In addition, in the 1950s and ’60s, the Douro was dammed in several places, making the boats obsolete.

>The styles and nomenclature of Port have changed considerably over the years. The most famous product of the Douro, Vintage Porto, represents at most two percent of port production, the rest being Ruby Port (now usually called “Reserve”), Late Bottled Vintage Port (LBV), Tawny Port of various ages, so-called “crusted” Port, white Port and different proprietary branded Ports. Vintage Porto from a “declared” year, however, remains one of the world’s great wines and, compared to Burgundy and Bordeaux and the cult wines of California and Australia, a relative bargain. Remember that Vintage Port, aged in barrels two years, is intended to mature in the bottle, most not being considered ready to drink until 20 or 30 years after harvest. In youth, they are powerful, potent and monumentally tannic. Which leads to:

A Tasting of Ports from 2007.

Thursday, Sept. 3, our team of six regrouped at the Niepoort winery at Quinta do Napoles to taste 15 Ports from 2007. The trick was that we were tasting three examples of each Port, one bottle that had been opened two days previously, decanted and poured back into the bottle; one that had been opened one day previously, decanted and poured back into the bottle; and one that had been opened the morning of the tasting but not decanted. The idea was to give us some hint as to the wine’s potential for development and to counter-balance the immense difficulty involved in tasting very young, tannic Ports. So we didn’t taste 15 Ports; we tasted 45 Ports, AND we tasted them blind AND we did this between about 7:30 and 9 p.m. And that’s why we’re called Professionals!

My notes will try to trace the evolution of the Ports we tasted; remember that as we were doing this, we didn’t know which bottles of a particular house or brand were the ones that had been opened two days ago or the ones opened 12 hours ago, but believe me, when you take in a sip of wine and the tannins would strip the wallpaper from your mouth (if your mouth were, say, a living room), then you know you have the most recently opened example. As the tasting proceeded, and I realized that my notes on the Ports tended to run: 1. Opened two days ago; 2. Opened one day ago; 3. opened this morning, I sensed that there was a pattern, and indeed the pouring of the examples did not vary from that scheme.

These Vintage Ports from 2007, a year described as “classic” and “exceptional,” are just coming into retail markets in the United States. Prices will range from about $75 and $85 to $115 and $125.

These notes are in the order of tasting.
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Churchill’s Vintage Port 2007. Massive tannins, searing tannins, followed by a clearing of the air, so to speak, broadly intense and concentrated and smoky; then, aromas of grapes, orange rind, spice cake and plum pudding; clean earth and minerals, deep, intense and concentrated, spicy black fruit, dense and chewy; walloping tannins; great presence and weight. Excellent potential.
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Croft Vintage Port 2007. Very tannic but rich and succulent; coffee, mocha, cocoa bean, fruit cake, toasted walnuts and orange rind; cool, clean minerals; dark chocolate, smoke and tobacco leaf; plummy and jammy, mint and minerals; leather, briers and brambles, packed with tannins. Exceptional potential.
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Dow’s Vintage Port 2007. Punishing tannins; then … big, jammy, minerally, slatey; bright, clean, black fruit infused with smoke and dark chocolate, dense yet almost buoyant tannins, tough and rooty, branches and briers. Very Good+ to Excellent potential.
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Fonesca Vintage Port 2007. Powerful tannic structure, huge presence and substance; then rich, warm and spicy, fruit cake and cookie dough, currants and plums, toasted almonds; intense and concentrated, platonic plums; black pepper, bitter chocolate-covered raspberries; crushed gravel and slate; immense. Excellent to Exceptional potential.
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Graham’s Vintage Port 2007. Fathomless tannins; then — fairly closed-in but hints of toast with orange marmalade or plum jam; grapey, alcoholic; clean, pure, intense, concentrated; tannins continue to build in scope and power. Needs 25 to 30 years. Maybe Excellent potential.
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Niepoort Vintage Port 2007. Deep, clean, pure and intense, smoky and toasty, tightly focused on sleek and stalwart tannins but opens to bitter chocolate, tobacco leaf, lavender and potpourri, plum jam and black currants; very dense and chewy; a finish of briers and brambles and forest floor, and a burgeoning mineral element. 25 to 40 years. Excellent, possibly Exceptional potential.
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Niepoort Pisca Vintage Porto 2007. From a single vineyard. Difficult to assess because of the massive tannins, though in the example that had been opened two days previously, decanted and re-bottled, the tannins felt smoother and more integrated. Clearly a Port that exudes self-containment, confidence and power, purity and intensity and concentration. 25 to 40 years. Excellent potential.
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The word Douro conjures one color: Red. As in Port. As in the table wines that Port companies and quintas have been producing for the past 10 or 15 years.

Yet in tasting the wines of the Douro Boys, I found the few whites wines that they make thrilling for their freshness and vibrancy, their spicy piquancy and beguiling floral character and frequently scintillating minerality. The grapes are little-known outside of the Douro Valley, and if you’re one of those steely-eyed devotees of the vine determined to make your entrance to The Century Club — you must have tasted wines from 100 different grapes — you’ll be gratified to know these the Douro whites are produced from such varieties as rabigato, codega, donzelinho, viosinho, arinto, gouveio and cercial. In other words, we don’t need no stinkin’ chardonnay and sauvignon blanc!

Unfortunately, these Douro whites are little found in the U.S., and I write about them today to provide a fuller picture of what’s happening in the Douro at present and perhaps to encourage enough interest that importers already bringing in the red wines and Ports of the Douro will latch onto the whites. (“White” in Portugeuse, by the way, is “branco.”) The one Douro white of this group that I know for certain is imported is the Quinta do Crasto Branco, by Broadbent Selections.

A number of these brancos were encountered at a tasting event for about 100 Portuguese winery people and wine sellers held in the new ultra-modern winery at Quinta do Vallado. This “Masterclass Tasting 2009″ went through all the 2007 red wines, including Ports, and the 2008 whites being released by the Douro Boys estates. Some of the wines I tried not only at this mammoth tasting but at the wineries too; I’ll include an amalgam of impressions in these brief notes.

>I tried the VZ Douro Branco 2008 at lunch at Quinta Vale D. Maria and later that afternoon at the “Masterclass Tasting.” At the second encounter, I wrote, “I could drink this forever.” Well, chalk that passionate response up to enthusiasm, but, still, it’s a reflection of how utterly engaging this wine is, with its beguiling touches of lime peel, tangerine and spiced lemon, its penetrating minerality, its zinging acidity and stony austere finish. The grapes are viosinho, rabigato and gouveio. VZ stands for van Zeller, as in Christiano van Zeller, of Quinta Vale D. Maria.

>The fresh and appealing Quinto do Crasto Branco 2008, which I also tried several times on this trip, offers lime and pink grapefruit flavors set into a package of tingling limestone and mouth-puckering acidity.

>Niepoort produces an intriguing range of white wines. The Tiara 2008 is earthy and minerally, with lime, grapefruit and roasted lemon scents and flavors display equal amounts of ripeness and funkiness wrapped around each other; a profound mineral elements, like wet gravel and dusty, damp roof tiles, exerts a broad influence, while after a few moments in the glass touches of celery, dried thyme and tarragon emerge. Loads of personality.
Niepoort’s Redoma Branco 2008 is made primarily from rabigato grapes with some codega and small amounts of other grapes; these are mainly 60-year-old vines, with three small parcels more than 100 years old. The wine is insanely floral and amazingly minerally, with the kind of substance, heft and depth one expects from old vine grapes, and with an authority of dry austerity, yet there’s a winsome attractiveness here too. A rather astonishing performance.
Finally, the Redoma Reserva Branco 2008 is even deeper, broader in scale, more demanding than its non-reserve cousin, with not only impressive but imposing minerality. It’s a white wine that deserves, nay, demands three to fives years’ aging.

>Quinta do Vallado also presented three branco wines.
The basic level Vallado Branco 2008 is made from rabigato, viosinho, arinto and verdelho grapes. The wine is aged 90 percent in stainless steel for five months, the remainder in new French oak barriques. The bouquet is a cornucopia of fresh and dried flowers with a cocktail of yellow fruit and berries; the wine is dry, crisp and spicy and delivers lovely body and substance. An irresistible aperitif.
Made completely in stainless steel, the Quinta do Vallado Moscatel Galego 2008 offers lime, nectarine and peach scents and flavors woven with honeysuckle, jasmine and crushed gravel for the mineral element. A hint of mint and white pepper on the finish alleviates a touch of bracing bitterness. Just lovely. (275 cases)
Finally, the Quinta do Vallado Reserva 2008 is fermented in French oak and aged in barriques for 10 months. Not surprisingly, the regimen lends considerable body and depth of spice to the wine, yet does not interfere with its enticing touches of dusty lime, almond blossom and roasted almond, vibrant acidity and resonant limestone-damp slate qualities. As the song says, “Lovely to look at, delightful to hold and heaven to kiss.” Well, you get the idea. (375 cases)
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At a long late leisurely dinner at Niepoort’s Quinta do Napoles facility, a sleek modern building that blends into its hillside, we drank magnums of Tiara 2008 with a variety of courses, including what I thought was not only the best dish I had in the Douro but one of the greatest dishes I have eaten in my life. No kidding! This was no nuanced feat of fine cuisine, but a peasant dish of cod tripe with white beans, a variation of the tripe with white beans that’s a specialty of the city of Oporto. Tripa de bacalao is actually the cod’s swimming bladder or maw; yes, it’s a tad rubbery and chewy, but marinated and simmered in a stew it comes out deeply flavorful, almost plush. The dish is question consisted of slices of the cod “tripe” with tender white beans and a small portion of a mild, very finely-chopped sort of sauerkraut. The rich broth that enveloped these ingredients was enlivened with minced carrots, red peppers and parsley; something, perhaps the red peppers, lent spicy heat to the dish. Long after my compatriots had moved onto the next course and the next wines, I refused to let my plate be taken; no, I sat there with a piece of crusty bread, soaking up all the juice that I could, sipping from my glass of crisp, refreshing Tiara 2008 that was the perfect accompaniment.
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The next night, that would be a week ago today — and isn’t it a wonder how quickly foreign travel recedes into the past? — our group, along with some of the Douro Boys and winemakers and their families, had dinner at the old Niepoort lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Oporto, not far from where the Douro debouches into the Atlantic. It used to be the case that shippers of Port were required to age the wine in casks in their lodges (large warehouses) in Vila Nova de Gaia rather than upriver at the quintas. Anyway, on the one essential occasion when I should have had my camera, Mr. Professional Journalist left it in his hotel room, thinking, “Gee, I’ve been carrying that camera for days. Maybe tonight I can relax.” The 150-year-old lodge, however, dim and dusty and cobweb-festooned, its vaulted ceilings blanketed with the mold of the ages, was a tremendously evocative and picturesque scene. Dinner was not memorable, but the wines were astounding, as Dirk Niepoort, a towering combination of generosity and chutzpah, opened bottle after bottle of rarities, ending with a pair of the company’s Ports from 1966.

But what I want to mention in particular is a couple of white wines, since that is that topic of today’s post. Dirk began by opening a magnum of a white wine from 1996, I’m not sure if it was Tiara or Redoma Branco, but the point is that this 13-year-old white wine — not chardonnay! not sauvignon blanc and semillon! — was remarkably fresh and clean and appealing, with pear and roasted lemon scents and flavors, bright acidity, a keen edge of damp slate; traces of honeyed orange rind and melon came into play, along with hints of almond and almond blossom over a reservoir of deeply spicy citrus. Amazing.

Before moving to the Ports, Dirk Niepoort said, “Do you want to try the first wine I ever made?” Dumbfounded, we all went, “Well, like, duh, yeah.” This turned out to be a dessert wine from 1987. One of my fellow wine writers, Sarah Ahmed from London, took a few sniffs and sips, made a note or two, and said, “Loureiro grapes?” Dirk replied, “Yes, mostly,” and I thought, “Holy shit, she is good!” Loureiro contributes the fresh, drinkable, brisk immediacy of Vinho Verde, but this 22-year-old sweet wine indicated that under some circumstances the grape definitely has a higher calling. First it was delicate, finely-knit, a delightful combination of mildly sweet pear and roasted lemon permeated by orange zest and cloves. While retaining that breezy freshness and cleanness and its flashing blade of acidity, the wine deepened in the glass, calling up toasted almonds, quince, a hint of green plum. The finish turned dry, a little smoky, yet still amazingly clean and vibrant. Lord have mercy!

It was one of those nights when you get back to the hotel at midnight, happy and sated, put in a wake-up call for 5 because a car is coming for you at 6:15, and then pack the bags.

Last Friday morning, our small group rode in the back of an open truck, driven by winery co-manager Francisco “Chico” Ferreira, up and up and up, through switch-back turns so extreme that the truck had to pass the turn, back around to the edge of the terrifying overhand — this is scary! — and then steer back into the angle, to the top of the vineyards of Quinta do Vallado, where the tinta roriz vines (the Spanish tempranillo) are 90 years old; a few vines of white grapes are scattered through the rows. At this altitude, about 400 meters (1,312 feet), the roots of the vines burrow 25 to 30 feet deep seeking water. The stalks are twisted and gnarly, like caricatures of grapevines, and hardly seem as if they could support life, not to mention grapes of extremely high intensity and character. The view from this height is spectacular, as I mention with each post about the Douro region, but the sublime landscape is inescapable.

After a bone-crunching ride back to the winery — Quinta do Vallado, by the way, was the home of Dona Antonia Ferreira (1811-1896), the godmother of the Douro — we assemble with Chico in the tasting room, attended by a young woman wearing a white laboratory coat, to try Quinta do Vallado Reserva 2000, 2003, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06 and ‘07. I’ll get to that portion of the tasting later in this post, but first I want to describe the event that will compel me to add the term Wine Consultant to my business card.

Chico set up a blind tasting of five cask samples of wine from the 2008 vintage: 1. Touriga nacional from nine-year-old vineyards; 2. touriga nacional from 20 year-old vineyards; 3. sousão grapes; 4. a blend of red wines from old vineyards; 5. another blend of red wines from a different old vineyard. Chico gave us three hints: The touriga nacional should be elegant with touches of violets; the sousão should have an intense color and fresh acidity; the old vine samples should show lots of complexity and structure.

So, we spent several minutes swirling, sniffing and sipping the wines, taking notes and so forth, and when Chico revealed which wines were which, I had only gotten two right. Hey, give me some cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir! I’ll show you how to taste blind!

Then, Chico said that we would assemble a theoretical blend for the Reserva 2008 from four of the wines left in our glasses, omitting the young touriga nacional, and he would judge which was best. Ah, now the competition heated up. I mean, here were six experienced wine tasters and writers vying to assemble a potentially great wine, each thinking that he or she, of course, knew more than any of the others about the balance of elegance and power. Like scientists, we used the graduated beaker to measure the proportions of the four samples, trying for the ideal of a young reserve wine.

My formula turned out to be 50 percent of the touriga nacional from 20-year-old vines; 10 percent sousão; and 20 percent each of the wines from the two old vineyards.

Chico went around the table, peering intently at each glass of the finished blend, swirling, sniffing, sipping. He performed this process twice, and then he stopped by my chair and again picked up the glass holding my creation. “This it is,” he said. “Fredric got the right aromas, the right intensity and flavor. He wins the prize.” And there actually was a prize, a magnum of Quinta do Vallado Reserva 2006 in a wooden box, which I brought back to the U.S., through three flights, wrapped in two plastic bags and then rolled up in two shirts, in my checked luggage. Sadly, I abandoned the wooden box — sorry, Chico! — as too big, heavy and awkward.

I wasn’t the only winner. Rebecca Leung, a writer from Hong Kong (Wine Is Beautiful, but she writes in Chinese), also won a magnum of Quinta do Vallado Reserva 2006 for guessing — or, I should say, professionally ascertaining with cool acumen — the correct components in the first blind tasting of cask samples.

Of the Quinto do Vallado Reserva wines that we tasted from 2000 and 2003 through 2007, Chico said, “These are made in my style of wine, tannic, with lots of structure.” He wasn’t wrong, yet the wines exhibited, in addition to bastions and buttresses of tannin and oak and minerals, lovely touches of fruit and flowers and herbs that wheedle their way into your heart. Well, some of them, anyway. The wines usually age 18 months in 70 percent new French barriques, 30 percent one-year old barrels. Occasionally one wants to ask: Is it only small French oak barrels that can make great wine? Are there not alternatives? Think of the glorious authenticity of Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino before the winemakers turned slavishly to the barrique. Oh, well, never mind.

Here are brief notes:

>2000. Dried spice and flowers, v. dark purple, deep solid structure, muscular, a little angular; intense, concentrated, shimmering black fruit flavors. Needs a steak. Drink through 2014 or ‘15. Very Good+

>2003. Immensely aromatic, cedar, tobacco, black olive, granite and slate; blazing acidity for vibrancy and resonance; picks up fleshier fruit and exotic spice; dusty tannins lead to an austere finish. bring out another steak. Drink through 2014 or ‘15. Excellent.
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The train ride from Pêso da Régua to Pocinho takes about an hour and a half. It’s a wildly picturesque route, with the tracks laid just at the edge of the Douro River and at the base of steep hillsides where terraced vineyards that seem impossible to cultivate alternate with massive granite outcroppings. Whoever conceived that grapes could be grown here? Yet the Douro is the earliest delimited wine region in Europe, its system of control and classification codified in 1756.

Pêso da Régua is the central town of Baixo Corgo, the lower part of the Douro growing region. The train lumbers east through Cima Corgo, the middle region, to Douro Superior, the driest, hottest and most sparsely populated area of the Douro. Rainfall is about 19.7 inches annually in Douro Superior, compared to 35.4 inches downriver in Baixo Corgo; the average annual temperature is 70 (degrees fahrenheit) compared to 64 further west.

Pocinho, about 20 kilometers from the Spanish border, is the end of the rail line. It’s about 10:40 a.m. when we jump off the steps of the railroad car, but the station clock unchangingly asserts that the time is 4:25. The heat is lavish, penetrating. The village is dusty, shuttered, ramshackle, like a set for the kind of Western movie that ends with everyone being sadder but no one being wiser.

High above, in the scrub-covered hills, however, lies an oasis, the Quinta do Vale Meão, founded in 1877 by Dona Antonia Adelaide Ferreira, who, in the period of her greatest power, owned 30 properties in the Douro, making her the most important proprietor in the region. When Dona Antonia bought the property, the local saying was that she would better have bought land in Angola, because that African country was more accessible than Pocinho. “But then the railroad was built through, as she knew it would be,” says Quinta do Vale Meão’s present owner, Francisco Javier de Olazabal, the great-great-grandson of Dona Antonia. “That cut the travel from Porto to Pocinho from 12 days to five hours. Now it takes only four hours by train, so, you see, we improve by one hour each century.”

Francisco Javier de Olazabal is known as Vito, to distinguish him from his son, Francisco, the winemaker at Meão, who is called Xito; Xito’s cousin, Francisco Ferreira, also a descendant of Dona Antonia and the winemaker at Quinta do Vallado, is known as Chico. The close relationship between Vito, Xito and Chico merely touches the surface of the root structure of relatedness by family, marriage and quinta ownership that permeates the Douro and goes back generations. It is not uncommon in the Douro to be talking to a gentleman who happens to own this quinta and that quinta and used to own this other quinta — meaning an estate — but he sold it to his cousin, and then to talk to this gentleman’s wife and discover that she and her family own another quinta. A chart of the history of the families and quintas of the Douro would resembles a game of Chutes and Ladders.

Quinta do Vallado and Quinta do Vale Meão, along with Quinta do Crasto, Quinta do Vale D. Maria and Niepoort Vinhos, form the group rather exuberantly named Douro Boys, dedicated to advancing the quality and the image of the region, not only through port but through the increasingly important table wine segment, which, for these estates, dominates their production.

A bone-crunching ride in a battered pick-up truck takes us to a high point on the Vale Meão estate, 350 meters about the river, from which the view is stupendous. The hills recede from the Douro in its upper reaches (in Portugal) and the landscape broadens. “There are over 130 grape varieties in the Douro,” Vito tells us, “so there is always the potential for finding new things in what is already here. There is need to put much investigation into these grapes.” In other words, we don’t need cabernet and merlot, though, oddly, that night we taste fermenting pinot noir from the tank at Niepoort. The vineyards here, stretching down and around the hillsides, are planted to touriga nacional (50%), tinta roriz, known as tempranillo in Spain (30%), touriga francesa (15%), tinta amarela (5%), tinta barraca (5%) and tinta cao (5%). The vineyards are not planted as field blends, as used to be common in the Douro. “Everything is block planted,” says Vito, “because grapes are different and have different needs and act differently.” Eighty-one hectares, about 208 acres, are under vine at Meão, with 65 hectares in full production.

A few parcels are being picked in the noonday sun. Workers go through the rows, bending to their task, clippers in one hand, finding the cluster of grapes with the other and needing a third hand to push away the leaves and other stalks. They carry a pail for the bunches, and when the pail is filled, it is emptied into a plastic bin. Other workers collect the bins and load them onto the truck for transport to the winery and the sorting table. Pickers are paid 33 euros (about $52) for an eight-hour day, that is, two four-hour segments, beginning at 8 a.m., with a lunch break. The producer pays for the workers’ social security and insurance. Some work full-time at the estate, but most are seasonal workers who move from one region to another through a contractor.

For many years, Vito was president of the family company, Ferreira, but he resigned in 1998 to restore Quinta do Vale Meão. That task included a careful restoration of the 140-year-old winery, with its walls of double granite and its beautiful roof and ceiling of fine old chestnut beams. Though the winery is filled with modern steel tanks and a new office and laboratory, it retains the original rugged concrete legares, though somewhat smaller, and a sense of history compounded of the smell of oak and fermenting grapes and the record of a century and a half of vintages.

In the winery’s tasting room, we go through nine vintages of Quinta do Vale Meão Douro Red, 1999 to 2007. Here are brief notes on each wine:

>1999. “An experiment” — only 10 percent of the winery’s production in its first year — that turned out beautifully. Radiant, spicy, beguiling at first, then dense and chewy, a marriage of power and elegance; vibrant and resonant; black currant, plum and lilac, elements of moss and minerals slowly build, feels deeply attached to the earth; an ache of tannin at the back of the throat. Could age another five to seven years. Exceptional.
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I want to show readers something that most people who casually drink wine or love wine or collect wine don’t see, and that’s what happens to grapes just after they’re picked.

Wednsday, my group spent part of the morning and early afternoon at Quinta Vale D. Maria, a small property way on top of a minor mountain reached by a hair-raising drive on a narrow dirt road of insane hair-pin turns so precipitously close to a sheer drop-off that only a line of dusty olive trees seemed to keep us from falling to certain death. At least that’s the way it felt to me.

We were driven up to the winery and house by jovial and bear-like Christiano van Zeller, who owns the property along with his wife, Joane. Quinta Vale D. Maria had been in his wife’s family, he said, for 250 years.

We happened to arrive just as harvest was beginning on the steep, terraced vineyards and were privileged to observe the process by which grapes are transformed from firm little clusters of globules to a mass of stuff that looks like bubbling blue beastie brains, ready for fermentation.
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Because Quinta Vale D. Maria is not a huge operation, the process was carried out by a few young workers. One man stood in the back of a truck that was filled with plastic bins of grapes. The grapes, by the way, represented a field blend of about 40 red varieties and would go into the estate’s table wine, about 85 percent of the production, with the other 15 percent being port. This fellow dumped the grapes onto the sorting table where a couple of women inspected the bunches and discarded any that looked “green” (not ripe enough) or bruised and damaged. We asked van Zeller what happened to the bins of discarded grapes, and he said that the workers would take them home and make wine for themselves and their families.
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Here’s an image taken from the other side of the action. You can get a hint, from the background, of how stunning the landscape of the Douro Valley is, with its high hills and deep valleys lined with vineyards that seem impossible to cultivate. In fact, as often happens with the sites of great vineyards and winemaking, they seem planted in places that ought to be utterly inhospitable to farming.

The top of the sorting table is actually a conveyor belt that moves the grapes along slowly and drops them into a bin below.
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Here you see the grapes coming to the end of the conveyor belt and falling into the welcoming arms (so to speak) of the destemming machine, a rotating steel screw that separates the grapes and stems and send the shorn grapes into a fat plastic hose to be pumped several yards away into a large concrete vat called a lagare.
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Quinta Vale D. Maria has four lagares, each capable of holding 4,000 to 5,000 kilograms, 4,000 kilos being a bit more than 8,800 pounds of grapes and juice (the “must”). The grapes ferment both in the lagare and in tanks. Each tank in the fermentation room holds the result of one lagare. Red tables wines ferment for seven to eight days, but juice for port ferments only two to three days. Table wine goes into small French barriques (about 59 gallons), while port goes into large old casks and stainless steel tanks.
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This machine is the “robot,” an electronically controlled device that crushes the grapes in the lagare. It can be coordinated so that the legs move up and down in sequence together or alternately or back and forth. Vale D. Maria still using the traditional foot-crushing, in which the workers enter the lagares and, one supposes, with a great deal of both concentration and hilarity, use their bare feet to crush the grapes. This ancient practice, van Zeller told us, “is important to make sure that the crushing is homogeneous.”
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The result of the grapes we saw being handled today would be Quinta Vale D. Maria’s red table wine, of which the winery produces about 25,000 bottles (about 2,100 cases), an amount, van Zeller said, that is slowly increasing. With enologist Sandra Tavares, our small group tasted vintages 2001 through 2008 of this wine, which is made from vines that are 60 to 70 years old, and whatever the variations of weather and technique involved, the wines were consistently robust and vigorous, deeply aromatic and flavorful, resolutely minerally and generally the embodiment of a marriage between power and elegance.
Quinta Vale D. Maria has importers on the East and West Coasts of the U.S.
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There’s much more to tell Readers, like tasting 45 ports from 2007 last night, or our train trip yesterday out to the eastern reaches of the Douro, almost to Spain, to spend an afternoon at Quinta do Vale Meao, and so on. Those events and others will come in future posts, but now I have to prepare for another day of tasting and traveling, this time by boat. I hope it’s a large, safe, comforting boat and not a small, dangerous, death-defying boat. Not that I care.
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Readers, it’s another river, but not the Rhine. As you can see on the left, vines grow here on terraced slopes, the banks are dotted with little towns, and the weather is beautiful. It took me three flights to get here; the first was two hours, the second between six and seven hours, and the last less than one hour, followed by a car ride of an hour and a half. A long day of travel, or night and day, or whatever, because my time-frame is all mixed up. The question is “Where Is F.K.?”

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OPPENHEIM — Readers, when I was first in Oppenheim at Hotel Zwo, looking out my window, I saw a black BMW pull into the parking lot. I could see, painted on the hood of the car, the words “Deutsche Weinkonigin.” Now I know about as much German as Young Werther knew Pig Latin, but even I could tell that the words translated as “German Wine Queen.” What the hell? I thought, there’s a German Wine Queen?

Indeed there is, and it’s a tradition that goes back 60 years.

Here’s a picture I took of Marlies Dumbsky, the German Wine Queen for 2008-2009, and that’s exactly how she introduces herself: “Hello, I’m the German Wine Queen.”

Each of the German wine regions elects a queen, and so on until in a national competition, for Wine Queen for the whole country is chosen. It’s not just a beauty contest, though the current holder of the office is obviously attractive. Marlies graduated from the Wine Institute in Geisenheim, and she worked for two years at her parents’ winery in Franken. The German Wine Queen puts her life and studies or whatever other job she has on hold for a year and travels practically every day in the promotion of German wine, even, for Marlies, to Japan and Korea and China, to the United States, and she travels constantly inside Germany and to other European countries.

And — was it because our group was important, prestigious or lucky? Marlies traveled with us for two days, always upbeat and engaging, though journalists tend to be a grumpy and demanding species. (I’m kidding, of course; we were sweethearts.) Many times, during our tastings and discussions, she displayed her knowledge about the intricacies of German and EU wine regulations and about grape-growing and winemaking, even, occasionally, gently correcting the assertions of our official guide.

We were sorry to see her go, but German Wine Queen duties beckoned elsewhere.

Thanks, Marlies, you were a real queen!

And no, she doesn’t wear her tiara all the time. She keeps it in her car for emergencies, such as when a bunch of journalists start whining, “Oh, come on, Marlies, put on your crown!”

Wine making, from beginning to end, starting in the vineyard, is a matter of balance. It’s either the easier thing in the world or one of the most complicated.

Listen to Rainer Eymann, owner and winemaker of Weingut Eymann, whose facility is located in the village of Gonnheim, in Germany’s vast Pfalz vineyard region. Standing in one of his vineyards, within a five-minute walk of the winery — even as a village, Gonnheim ranks as small — you will see, off in the west, the blue-gray bulk of the Haardt mountains, while farther away in the east, you discern the distant blur of the Odenwald. Also in the east, about 15 kilometers from where we’re standing, winds the Rhine River, the waterway that over thousands of years created this broad valley and laid down its rich loess soil.

Eymann has run his domaine using organic methods for 27 years; in 2006, he increased the intensity of the treatment by going with biodynamic principles. The estate consists of 15 hectares (about 39.5 acres) of vineyards around Gonnheim, planted to 70 percent white grapes, mostly riesling, and 30 percent red, mostly pinot noir, with a broad range of other grapes. He makes a little sparkling wine in addition to still wines.

“When I began organic,” he said, “people around here thought I was looney, but times have changed. Organic and biodynamic have reached the top producers now. There was a legend that organic wines would not be high quality, but everybody knows now that it’s not true. Still, we’re always learning with organic and biodynamic agriculture. In 20 years, we may be doing something different.”

The soil where Eymann has planted his feet in stalwart fashion between two rows of vines is some 30 meters deep, with eight to 12 percent lime, or “calcareous soil.” The sky that hovers over us is mottled with shifting and blowing dark clouds; one would swear that rain was on the way, but Pfalz in actually the driest area of Germany.

“The problem,” said Eymann, “is that the weather comes from the southwest. It rains in the mountains, but stops in the plains and then picks up again in the Odenwalt to the east. We have soil that can store lots of water, but we don’t have enough rain, and this effect is enforced by the change in climate. We put down the cover crops between the rows [between every other row] to help the fertility of the soil, but that also takes away some of the water that we need.”

This delicate balancing act, as if the vineyard were poised on a high-wire and the farmer/winemaker were a circus master urging the performer carefully onward, requires craft and experience to maintain. First, Eymann lays down a rough compost material in alternate rows (alternate to the cover-crop) to protect the soil from erosion, because, “we don’t get much rain, but when it rains, it pours.” Second, and especially after the record-breaking and death-dealing heat of the summer of 2003, he installed a drip irrigation system.

Constant work goes on in the vineyard toward leaf, canopy and cluster management. Harvesting is done by hand.

To defeat fungus, Eymann sprays, from the organic farming tradition, different extracts of plants, seaweed, mixtures of stone-dust, minerals, copper and sulfur. He also uses the well-known (or infamous) biodynamic mixtures called 500 — “horn manure” — and 501 — “horn silica.”

When I asked Eymann why he decided, three years ago, to take his organic methods to the level of biodynamic, he said, “I was just interested in what’s happening. I was in contact with a lot of farmers using biodynamic and we talked, and I decided to try it. The main point is that you have the basis of organic farming, and biodynamic is the apex of it. After three years, you cannot tell safely by statistics that anything is different, but we are building on the basis of 20 years or more of good organic practice. We have done many things, so I would never say that because of 500 or 501 that we are making good wine. We have to wait and see.” He did say that he believes that because of using biodynamic methods his wines taste more authentic, that you can smell and taste the vineyard more intensely, and that the wines “are more sophisticated.”

What is important, he said, is the health of the grapes. “Quality comes from the vineyard, from selecting the grapes and treating them gently. Quality is not coincidence. It takes planning and craft and management. We do not want to produce the same wine every year. The wine should reflect the vineyard and the vintage and the fingerprint of the winemaker.”
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O.K., Readers, it’s 12.45 a.m. on Saturday, and I have a plane to catch in Frankfurt at 12:25 p.m. I suppose I should get a few hours sleep, but maybe I should go ahead and pack. Or read for a few minutes. Each day on this three-day whirlwind tour of organic estates in Rheingau, Rheinhessen and Pfalz, we have visited three or four wineries, had lunch at some and tasted wines, met other winemakers for dinner and tasted their wines. I have a lot to write about, not only about individual estates and wines, and meals we had, but about the issues and concerns that surround organic and biodynamioc methods. We had a terrific group of wonderful, funny and companionable people, though I’ll tell you that if you give 12 journalists a big enough bus, they will not share a seat! No way! We need the second seat for all our gear! Actually our number was diminished today (I mean yesterday), and sometime, perhaps, I’ll tell you the story — like something out of Beckett or Flann O’Brien — of the jolly Irishman who had to drive back to Dublin suddenly because he discovered that his passport expired at midnight.

But that’s for another day.
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OPPENHEIM — Well, Readers, I’m seriously underdressed for this expedition. Last week the temperature was in the mid-80s in northern Europe, and I packed my bag accordingly. Yesterday morning, I could have used a scarf and sweater when we boarded the bus that took us to the Geisenheim Research Institute (about 45 minutes away), for a presentation by Prof. Dr. Randolf Kauer and to visit one of the school’s experimental vineyards. (We also had lunch in the student cafeteria, where the food was neither better nor worse than the food in any student cafeteria in the world.) Kauer is apparently the only scientist in Europe devoted exclusively to the study of organic and biodynamic farming methods, and he and his students take a rigorous approach to these important subjects.

They’re important for two reasons. First, more and more grape-farmers, estate-owners and winemakers are turning to organic or biodynamic methods to ensure the health of the soil and terroir and to (theoretically, at least) produce better wine. (Still, “more and more” adds up to less than two percent of vineyard acreage in Germany.) Second, the notion of “organic” in this new sense, along with the general tenor of the “green” movement, permeates world culture now; the zeitgeist is green, friends, and marketability and profitability in many industries is tied (however tenuously and temporarily) to the process of going organic.

I’ll hit some high-points of Prof. Kauer’s illustrated lecture here and delve into the implications of organic and biodynamic practices next week when I’m back in the USA. Kauer was well-spoken, engaging and slyly humorous. I mean, you have to like a guy who will stand up in public and say, “What is spontaneous fermentation, I often ask myself.”

Kauer divided organic practices into three levels: (1) Sustainable or Integrated Viticulture, that is “good viticultural practices” that all growers should perform; (2) Certified Sustainable Viticulture, which take #1 and adds guidelines set down by the federal states (of Germany); (3) Certified Organic or Biodunamic Viticulture, which takes points 1 and 2 and adds the guidelines and controls of the various organic associations, such as ECOVIN and Demeter.

These levels of activity are aimed at producing the healthiest soil and the healthiest vines possible, most of the work involving treatment of the vines themselves — reducing vigor, exact training systems and canopy management, creating looser clusters — such treatment being, as Kauer said, “the highest priority.”

The professor spent 30 minutes or so — he was giving us, he said, “a whole course work of information in two hours” — on biodynamic methods, his attitude toward such practices as horn manure, dynamization, various teas and mixtures, following the progress of the moon and stars, being with “an open mind.” When I asked him if, as a scientist, he shouldn’t also take a skeptical approach, he said that he had to balance his openmindedness with his training as a scientific skeptic. “We cannot say at this time if biodynamism is scientifically based. The result of our tests and trials could be that they make no difference.”

One of our group asked if that result would be accepted by the adherents of “bio.” Kauer said, emphatically, “No,” meaning that fanatics for the principles of Rudolf Steiner will not be unconvinced. “We do see,” he added, “that with the use of horn silica the grapes are ripening earlier.”

Because the European wine industry is highly regulated and the American wine industry is not, many of the problems that profoundly engage government bureaus, grape growers, winemakers and producers and the EU in general will seem arcane to their counterparts in America. Besides regulations, many based on historical, regional traditions, that govern permitted grape varieties, plantings, yields, use of sugar and acid and so on, the debates about how organic practices should be regulated are fierce. For example, the use of sulfites in processing wine is very controversial. According to Kauer, producers in Italy want to reduce the amount of sulfur permitted in wine processing by half in organic wines. Producers in Germany, France, Austria and other countries, however, want to use the same level of sulfites in organic wines as are permitted in “conventional” wines, because, the argument goes, many winemakers use less than the permitted amount anyway.

“Sulfite content should not be a criteria for organic labeling and regulation,” Kauer said. “We don’t need such regulation. We already have the regulations against GMOs, and that is enough.” The Italians, Kauer suspects, “are looking toward future marketing,” a stance that perhaps says as much about attitudes toward Italy as it does about the use of sulfites.

After lunch, Kauer met our group at the institute’s experimental vineyard high on a hill overlooking the Rhine and the outspreading valley that looked like a succession of rolling hillsides, villages, vineyards and the distant points of steeples against the cloudy sky.

He explained that the students at the institute maintain sections of conventional vines, organic vines and biodynamic vines side by side in order to track the similarities and differences in the soil, vines and grapes that result. To try and keep all factors equal, the various composts used for the vineyards, whether the composts are produced conventionally, organically or biodynamically, are often measured to make sure that the nitrogen levels in the applications are the same. Cover crops between the rows consist of up to 30 different grasses and flowering plants and herbs, making not only for healthy soil and providing cover for tiny animals and beneficial insects but offering a distinct wild beauty to the vineyards.

I asked Kauer if, because the sections of vineyards — conventional, organic, biodynamic — are planted next to each other, there was any bleed-through of elements and influences that would have an impact on the trial conclusions. He said that two lines of vines on each side of the sections are not measured and the grapes from those vines are not harvested to avoid contamination by other methods.
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Readers, I had intended to write this post last night, but we didn’t get back to the hotel in Oppenheim until midnight, and about the only activities I could manage were brushing my choppers and crashing into bed. I did, however, get up at six this morning to write and post this entry. Yesterday, we also tasted a group of organic wines with Gotz Drewitz, executive director of ECOVIN (and we were not terrifically impressed, particularly with the reds), and then traveled to the village of Oestrich, where the bus had difficulty maneuvering in medieval streets originally intended for goat carts, to the winery of Peter Jakob Kuhn, where he and his wife Angela devote considerable efforts toward biodynamic farming. The wines are splendid — more on them in another post — but is their high quality directly connected to their methods? Then we traveled to the village of Hattenheim, where we had a wonderful dinner at Hotel & Weinhaus Zum Krug, and more on that later, too.

Now it’s nine o’clock, and we’re about to set off on another day of traveling through the Rheingau, visiting estates and tasting wine. I’ll check back with you when I can.

Au revoir, or whatever.