Quinta da Leda – a great Douro wine and my Wine of the Week

The beautiful Quinta da Leda – photo courtesy of the estate.

Many of you will know that I really admire the wines of Portugal‘s Douro Valley. It is a world class wine region that is of course most famous for being the home of Port, but over the last two decades or so has really made its mark in unfortified table wines too. The quality can be very high, at many different price points and there are some seriously good producers whose wines are well worth seeking out.

One of which is Casa Ferreirinha, which grew out of the A. A. Ferreira Port house which was famously run by Dona Antónia Ferreira – often known as Ferreirinha – during the nineteenth century. She was a close friend of Joseph James Forrester, Baron Forrester, who before his untimely death in 1861, had apparently campaigned for the Douro Valley to start making unfortified wine rather than sweet and fortified Ports.

Perhaps that relationship planted a seed that was finally acted upon nearly a century later in 1952, when Casa Ferreirinha produced the first vintage of their occasionally released and legendary Barca Velha. That was the first non fortified red from the Douro for a few centuries and the first one to be commercially released and it was a hit, achieving cult status to equal Spain’s great Vega Sicilia. They don’t make it every year, in fact only 18 vintages have been released so far in total. When they don’t make Barca Velha, the finest barrels they produce make the almost equally illustrious Casa Ferreirinha Reserva Especial. Both of these wines are aged for a long time in oak before release.

The beautiful Quinta da Leda – photo courtesy of the estate.

In 1979 Casa Ferreirinha bought the promising, but unplanted  Quinta da Leda estate in Almendra just a few kilometres from the Spanish frontier. To see whether it lived up to their expectations they planted 25 hectares of Tinta Roriz – aka Tempranillo -, Touriga Franca, Tinta Barroca, Touriga Nacional and Tinta Cão vines. This is one of the great joys of Portugal, and especially the Douro, great wines that can rub shoulders with the most famous and most expensive from anywhere, all made from indigenous grape varieties.

Wine map of the Douro, Quinta da Leda is just to the west of Barca d’Alva on the south bank of the Douro near Spain. Click on the map for a larger view.

Within a decade they could see that their hopes for the plot had been exceeded and from the 1980s the vineyard had become the main source for Barca Velha and Reserva Especial, as well as producing Single Quinta Port. In the end the site was just so good that they decided to make a single vineyard wine from it, but only in the in the better years. The big difference with Barca Velha, apart from being a single vineyard wine, is that Quinta da Leda is aged for a more normal 12 months or so in oak, which makes it a fresher style and it can be enjoyed younger too. Sadly I cannot comment as I have not yet tried any Barca Velha, despite owning a brace of bottles of the 1982 vintage. The project has been a great success and a dedicated winery was built in time for the 2001 vintage, making these true domaine bottled wines.

Recently I was fortunate enough to attend a tasting of Quinta da Leda wines that ranged from that very first 1997 vintage to the as yet unreleased, but precociously delicious, 2014.

The beautiful Quinta da Leda – photo courtesy of the estate.

I loved them all and would happily drink any of them with a slow roast shoulder of lamb, but it was remarkable how I kept really loving the wines that came from great Port vintages – the 2007 and the 2011, stood out especially for me, but so too did the 2001, which is an underrated Port vintage, mainly being a source of Single Quinta Ports. However, without a doubt my favourite was the 2011 and so I have made it my Wine of the Week.

2011 Quinta da Leda
Casa Ferreirinha
Sogrape Vinhos
DOC / PDO Douro
Portugal

A single vineyard blend of 45% Touriga Franca, 40% Touriga Nacional and 15% Tinta Roriz. The grapes were destined and fermented in stainless steel tanks before being aged for 18 months in 225 litre French oak barrels, 50% of which were new.

The wine is currently an attractive opaque purple, deep, but bright and alive.

The nose offers intense, spicy sugar plums and blueberry, as well as cedar and earthy, spicy, savoury notes. There is a touch of cigar smoke as well as some mocha and herbs.

The palate is pretty full-bodied, but has a lovely texture, with concentrated, lush sweet black fruit together with some refreshing acidity and minerality. The tannins are taut but not overwhelming and there is a dusting of black pepper, while that smoke, spice and mocha vie with the lovely sweetness of the fruit on the long finish. All in all it is very concentrated, very exciting, beautifully balanced and utterly delicious with a touch of something pretty about it that helps to balance the power and the 14.5% alcohol – 94/100 points.

Available in the UK from £35 per bottle from Slurp, Lay & Wheeler, Farr Vintners, Corking Wines, The Wine Library, Hedonism, Harrods and AG Wines.
For US stockists, click here.

I actually really liked the wine as it is now, I loved the slightly tight feel of the tannins and the mocha-like oak, but it will develop beautifully too and become more complex over time. So you see, it isn’t only the 2015 Clarets that you should put in your cellar this year.

Wine of the Week 45 – an elegant and delicious Port

I love Port, as well as the unfortified wines of Portugal’s Douro region (do try this one here), and given how reluctant winter is to leave us this year, in the UK anyway, I thought this delicious Port that I discovered recently would be a lovely, warming Wine of the Week.

The beautiful terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley.

Port has long been dominated by the big brands, many of them still with British names, such as Grahams, Dows, Cockburns, Taylors etc., but that has been changing ever since 1986. Until that year, Port had to be taken from the vineyards in the Upper Douro Valley to the Port Lodges in Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto, where the big Port houses are based. It was these companies who aged and shipped the wine rather than the grape growers. After 1986 though, the growers were allowed to age and ship their own wines direct from their estates or Quintas in the Upper Douro.

This means that more and more Port is now made by the growers on their own estates, which can only add to the romance of the product. It is also in keeping with the rest of the wine world, where it is very common to find estates that have been growing grapes for decades, or longer, who in recent years have stopped selling their grapes to the big local producer, or cooperative and instead have started making the wines for themselves.

Map of the Douro – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

This is exactly what happened with the Quinta do Infantado, which is a delightful family run Port estate near the lovely village of Pinhão in the heart of the Douro. The Roseira family have been in charge here for well over a century, but the Quinta actually dates back to 1816, when it was founded by the Portuguese Crown Prince, or Infante – hence Infantado. Of course, like all the other growers, the Roseiras, and the Infante before them, sold their grapes to the big names shippers until 1986 – which is presumably explains why the Port houses were called ‘shippers’ rather than producers, which was something I always found odd.

The beautiful tiled railway station in Pinhão.

The beautiful tiled railway station in Pinhão.

The Douro is a very beautiful, rugged, wild place with a very hot climate in the growing season. The land slopes dramatically down to the Douro River and so much of the landscape is terraced to allow for efficient agriculture and to stop soil erosion. The soil is schist, which is decayed slate, so everything makes this a hard landscape to work and ensures that pretty much everything still has to be done by hand – and sometimes by foot – just as it always has. Rather wonderfully at Quinta do Infantado they do still tread the grapes in the traditional manner – this gives a rapid extraction of colour in the shallow, stone fermentation tanks called a lagares.

Vineyards are everywhere you look in Pinhão.

Large wooden vats for ageing Port. These are at Quinta do Noval, which is near Quinta do Infantado.

2009 Quinta do Infantado LBV Port
Port
The blend is 30% Touriga Franca, 30% Touriga Nacional, 30% Tinta Roriz (Tempranillo) with 10% of other local grapes. The grapes are trodden and the finished Port is aged for around 4 years in large (25,000) wooden vats that are over 100 years old and so give no wood flavour to the wine, but do soften the tannins. The finished wine is not filtered or fined before bottling. An LBV, or Late Bottled Vintage, is technically a Reserve Ruby Port from a single vintage.

The colour is an enticing intense, vibrant, deep ruby.
The nose is lifted, scented and lively with rich black fruit notes of blackberry and black cherry, warming spice, liquorice, aniseed, clove, smoke and cedar. There is a floral prettiness there too, even a twist of orange peel.
The palate is sumptuous and fresh tasting with delicious sweet black fruit and lots of red fruit too – rich red plum and cherry, gentle sweet spice, some dry spice and a little smoky, fine grain tannin on the finish. This was also a pretty dry style of Port, not dry exactly, but drier than most.
This is joyous, vibrant and beautifully balanced with excellent integration between the fruit and the alcohol, indeed for a Port it carries its 19.5% alcohol very well indeed.
If more affordable Port tasted this fresh and juicy, I would drink more of it – 91/100.

I greatly enjoyed this with some Manchego and Gorgonzola cheese, but it also goes superbly with chocolate.

Available in the UK for around £15 a bottle from The Wine Reserve, Slurp, Eclectic Tastes, The Drink Shop, Little Big Wine, Exel Wines and the Fine Wine Company. Further stockist information is available from the UK distributor, Liberty Wines.
The US distributor is Louis/Dressner Selections / LDM WINES INC and more stockist information is available here.

Do try this if you get the chance, it is utterly delicious without being overly heavy or spirity either, Quinta do Infantado also produce a wide range of other Ports and table wines too. If I get the chance to taste them I will report back on what those are like too.

Port and the Douro – perfect for Christmas

In my quest to tell you about some great wine books this Christmas I am currently reading the third edition of Port and the Douro by Richard Mayson. What better subject is there to read about at Christmas?

Richard Mayson

Port and the Douro
by Richard Mayson
with illustrations by Leo Duff
Published by Infinite Ideas at £30.00
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at around £27.00.

It is a sadness to me that I do not drink very much Port as I am very fond of the stuff and find it fascinating. I also regret the fact that as yet I still have not visited the Douro, although I hope to put that right very soon. In the meantime I will have to experience the region through Richard Mayson’s eyes and writing.

Luckily I am in capable hands. Richard clearly knows his subject and writes well in an authoritative and almost learned style.

Much to my surprise I greatly enjoyed the first section which gives a general history of Portugal as it relates to Port and the Douro, her wars, politics, culture and gastronomy – my only quibble would be the reference to Oliver Cromwell as a ‘Puritan’, which he certainly was not – but that aside I had learnt a great deal of interesting stuff by page 6.

Given the seeming long history of Port drinking and how closely it is associated with the British in our minds, I found it fascinating that Baltic and Hanseatic merchants actually got the trade going before we Brits arrived – even the Scots beat the English to it in the years before the Union.

I was also astonished by the fact that Port was a dry wine until well into the Eighteenth Century and had the English nickname of ‘black-strap‘. As this term is nowadays associated with molasses I had always understood it to be an archaic colloquial word for Royal Navy rum, but apparently it originally referred to Port.

The development of the wine bottle and of the style of Port we know today seem to go pretty much hand in hand and it seems that it was not really until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that Port as we know it appeared on the scene. The first recorded use of a Port house name – Croft – as a brand did not occur until 1810 and the practice was not commonplace for another eighty years or so – so only around the time my grandfather was born.

After all this wonderful background Richard settles down to inform us about the geography and geology of the region together with sections that detail the grape varieties that they use. There are maps too and profiles of all the estates marked on them.

The chapter that deals with how Port is made is endlessly interesting – the throw away line about the return to the use of lagares in the the 1990s, after they had been pretty much unused since the mid 1970s, and what that has meant for quality I found very illuminating. Surely it can be no coincidence that this overlaps with something of a Port renaissance.

The chapter on Port Types – referring to the wines rather than the people –  is endlessly fascinating fleshing out details on types of wine that I thought I knew and detailing odd little facts on the classifications and all the styles from Tawny to Rosé and Colheita to Vintage by way of White Port and Moscatel do Douro.

Vintage Port enjoys such fame that it deserves and receives a chapter to itself with vintage details going back to 1844. There is also a directory of Port producers and shippers, which I for one will find invaluable.

Add in sections that deal with the Douro’s table wines of the region, the storage and service of Port and what the future may hold for this great wine region, then I think Richard has done the Port proud and may well have produced the definitive book on the subject.

I have only seen an E book version and not the real thing, so have not felt it or flicked through it as I normally would and therefore have no idea if the book is has that undefinable lovely, tactile and pleasurable feeling that a good book should, but I did like the contents very much.

It is an excellent and beautifully illustrated book that covers Port and the Douro in depth and detail. It’s not a light read, but a serious volume for people who are genuinely interested in the subject and those who need a reference book on this fascinating subject.