Are VP's getting enough wood?

[uncle tom]

The wood aging of ports, and the consequent concentration of the sugars, seems to endow them with great lasting power after they have been bottled. My recent encounter with a Colheita from 1944 and Jacob's with an 1890, both bottled many years ago, revealed dark robust wines.

When VP's were routinely shipped in bulk (in wooden pipes) they were not only wood aged in Portugal, but spent some time in wood being shipped overseas, kept in the shippers warehouses and then in the bottler's stockroom, before finally being bottled.

Today the producers seem to favour keeping VP's in large wooden balseiros that give the wines little wood exposure, and virtually no concentration of the sugars; or in stainless steel tanks that give it none at all. The reason (I believe) is that this creates a wine that is much more attractive at first release.

But does it compromise the wine's ultimate staying power?

The question affords the excuse to taste some UK and Oporto bottled wines from vintages such as 1963 and 1966 back to back, but it also begs another question as to whether VP's were always aged in large vessels in Portugal, or in 550 litre pipes..?

Tom

[Alex Bridgeman]

I need to do a little research before giving a more complete answer, but from what little I remember port was traditionally made in a granite lagar, run off into large neutral barrels for two winters to integrate and then transferred into 55l casks to be shipped from Gaia to the UK. To remain vintage port, the wine should have been bottled by the receiving merchant no later than the autumn of the following year. (However, I freely admit that some merchants drew off and bottled to order, with some rumours that occasionally half-empty barrels were topped up with a later wine.)

Assuming that the rules and common practice was properly followed, then vintage port would have been matured in large wood tonnels for about 18 months and then 55l pipas for a further 6 to 18 months. To my mind, this is not substantially different from the treatment today - but what I see is much better control over the fermentation process than has ever been applied before, with the result that more fruit rich wines are being produced than was possible in the past but with no sacrifice of the components (mainly the tannins and the acidity) that are required for aging. If anything, I suspect that the wines from 2000 will last longer than their counterparts from the 1900 vintage.

Alex

[Glenn E.]

I have far less detailed knowledge of the subject than either of you, but I think that Port was typically only kept in the Douro for a single winter before being shipped down river to Vila Nova de Gaia. There were two reasons for that (as I recall):

1. Summer in the Douro can get excessively hot, and the Quintas didn't have nearly as good of cellars as the lodges in V.N.d.G.
2. There simply wasn't enough storage capacity in the Douro to hold the Port there for two winters.

I think it was held in large tonels (or whatever was available) over the winter, then transferred to pipas for transport the next spring, and then transferred (or not) into whatever storage medium that the shipper wanted to keep it in until declaration/bottling.

The lodges that I have toured in Gaia still store Port in hundreds of pipas, but that's still a small amount of Port compared to a single row of giant tonels.

[uncle tom]

Glenn makes the correct observation that the wines were sent down the river before the heat of the summer following vintage, and that the traditional mode of transport was the pipe, similar to that used to ship wines for overseas bottling.

Were the pipes decanted on arrival in VNG into larger vessels, and then decanted back into pipes a year later for shipment? - or did they stay in the 550 litre wooden pipes throughout?

In the lodges today, the stacks of pipes mostly contain wine being aged for tawnies and colheitas, while the big vats normally contain LBV, reserves or standard ports.

Tom