Honestly I don’t really know how are the Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Sousão, Tinto Cão and Tinta Roriz Ports aging. They are already in 250 liters barrels and after Christmas we will make the first tasting. Any volunteers to help us? Meanwhile, I asked my friends to share with us what they expect from the Port they helped to make. Here are some comments of the different teams:
Elisabete Pereira from Sousão team:
The whole experience was great. In other years, we were only able to see the beginning of the harvest, but this year we saw the complete process from the cleaning of the boxes for the harvest to the manual crushing of the grapes. Now we really know what it takes to create a wonderful Quevedo Port from excellent grapes, collected carefully by four women and made only from Sousão grapes. Now it only needs many years of rest to get a unique taste. The Sousão team really recommends the experience to anyone willing to spend a nice, relaxing, and different weekend!!
Marta Palmeira from Touriga Franca team:
632 kg of grapes will result in the best Port wine made from Touriga Franca in recent years. The fermentation time was the best of the five single-varietal. The brandy also helped. But the real flavour will come from the work of six busy hands not used to this work, and the slow and tired pace of the legs and feet of Dani, António, pequena Sara and myself. Next year we will taste it. And we’ll enjoy it for sure! Cheers
Diana, Ervilha, Manjas e Pedro from Tinta Roriz team:
Tinta Roriz, seven lines and a half
The grapes of Tinta Roriz were harvested by three and a half people, as one of us brought a baby in the womb. Maybe with this in his mind, Oscar gave us a varietal with huge bunches, plenty of taste, which we filled up in not even one hour; after that we helped Sousão and Touriga Franca teams, which were debating with lack of grapes and some laziness.When we arrived at the winery, after lunch, we cleared the boxes and moved the grapes to the machine that takes the stem out, after that we put the must in a container which we filled up up to the knees level. In the meantime we went for the traditional dive in the Douro river and we came back after dinner to tread the grapes few hours before we had harvested. Within one year we will make a toast!
