Austin Beeman

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What Makes VINTAGE PORT so special? 6TH GENERATION WINEMAKER | Fonseca | David Guimaraens

Austin Beeman

David Guimaraens, a sixth-generation winemaker at Fonseca, discusses the history and winemaking process of the renowned vintage port house.

He explains that Fonseca is located in Vila Nova de Gaia, separate from the vineyards in the Douro region where the grapes are grown. Guimaraens describes how his ancestors built relationships with local farmers and brought the port down from the Douro Valley to Vila Nova de Gaia for aging and blending. He also discusses the traditional method of foot treading used to extract color and tannin from the grape skins.

Guimaraens emphasizes the importance of vintage port, which is made from the best ports of a single harvest and ages in the bottle to develop rich flavors and aromas. He explains the process of decanting vintage port to remove sediment and highlights its ability to age for decades.

Guimaraens also discusses Fonseca Bin 27, a port that was launched by his father in 1972 and is known for its fruitiness and versatility.

He concludes by sharing the history of his family's involvement with Fonseca and the significance of the Fonseca name.


I hope you enjoy this beautiful 11 minute video.

THIS IS EPISODE 96 OF UNDERSTANDING WINE WITH AUSTIN BEEMAN

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TRANSCRIPT:

Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words’ and non-english words. Any persistent errors are mine alone.

Or, watch the video. It is awesome.

David Guimaraens:

Our first vintages at Fonseca were launched in the 1840s and still today, Fonseca is known as the vintage port house. It's the house that has the greatest number of a 100-point vintage ports.

My name is David Guimaraens and my family started Fonseca six generations ago, and I'm proud to have been the winemaker now back home for 33 years.

Well, welcome to the Fonseca Visitor Centre. We are in Vila Nova de Gaia, and Vila Nova de Gaia is where you come to get the history of the port trade, very much from the perspective of the port shipper, the port merchants. Where that is very important to put into context is when you think about the world of wine. Most wine regions around the world, the vineyards and the wineries are the same location.

We are here in Vila Nova de Gaia, which is in fact on the coast, very separate geographically to the demarcated wine region of the Douro where the vineyards are and where the young ports are made. That's very much a historical perspective, and when we look at our history that goes back over three centuries, the port trade is all about merchants like my family, my ancestors, who started trading in port.

We established ourselves here in Vila Nova de Gaia with our port lodges that we are in here today. My ancestors, as good merchants that they were, they would go to the valley and they built ongoing relationships with local farmers.

Port used to be brought down from the Douro Valley in the barrels, in these flat-bottomed boats who'd have to navigate through the rapids until they reached here, Vila Nova de Gaia, where the aging, the blending occurred.

Then it's exactly those merchants who did the other very important part of the trade, which is taking port to the four corners of the world to be served in the many different styles that port has. In the old days, most port would go to the market in barrel. In fact, up until 1970, the vintage port used to be bottled at the merchants in the different countries. In the UK, Holland, Denmark, three of our important traditional markets of vintage port.

When we think about the winemaking of port, we look at the traditional method of foot treading, where you take the grapes, which they'll be picked into these open granite fermenters. Then in the evening, for a fermentation batch of eight tons, we'll put 20 people in there, doing a very regimented treading. Then the next day, when most of the people who were treading the evening before were actually going to the vineyard to pick another batch of grapes, we'll keep a group of five or six people behind treading during the day.

That method, although it's very primitive, it is very effective. Because in port, because port is a fortified wine where we stop the fermentation halfway through by adding a neutral grape spirit, we have a very short time in which to extract all of the color and all of the tannin from the skins.

So, that's why this traditional method of foot treading is very effective. Still today, we continue to use that method for producing all of our vintage ports.

What makes vintage port so special, and what is vintage port? Vintage port is all about selecting the best ports that we make in one harvest and then these ports will sit in wood for two years, until they're bottled. Then, the vintage will go into the bottle and it will continue its aging process in the bottle. As the tawny ports aged in oak, in contact with oxygen, and get those nutty stars.

The vintage port, because it is bottled only two years after the harvest, very young, and then we'll continue aging in a reduced atmosphere with the absence of oxygen. What will happen is, as it ages, it throws its color and it develops all these wonderfully rich, spicy, bottle-maturity aromas.

That is why vintage port, I consider, is one of the greatest wines of the wine lover, because every bottle of vintage is a time capsule.

It'll capture the character of the year and the vineyards where it comes from. That's where you get the house style. Fonseca Vintage will be made up from Fonseca's three vineyards through properties. Together, it produces this extraordinary vintage port which is renowned for its intensity of fruit, its richness, its fatness, and its capacity to age for decades in the bottle. That will characterize a Fonseca Vintage.

An important aspect with vintage port is that, as it ages in the bottle, it will start throwing a sediment and that sediment will increase over time.

If you're going to be serving a vintage port which is older than four years of age, then you need to decant it.

That decanting is important so that you remove the sediment and so that what you serve is not cloudy. Because if you pour a bottle and lift it between each glass, you'll end up mixing up your sediment. That is a very important part of vintage port.

One of the other virtues of vintage port is exactly its ability to age in the bottle. For one, it is the safest bottle in your wine cellar, because if you forget about it, it's only going to get better. It's not something you can say about all of your wines in your wine cellar. But, this extraordinary ability to age for a lifetime in the bottle gives it the pleasures for any wine lover. If he discovers a vintage port that he likes, he can buy more than one bottle and then lay them down in his wine cellar and open a bottle when he feels like it. Accompany it as it ages.

That's one way of looking at vintage port. Another way of looking at vintage is that it's also an extraordinary gift to give to someone who you care for tremendously and you want that person to remember you, maybe even many years after we might not be here. For example, you have a godson, and instead of giving them a silver picture frame which will get lost somewhere, if you give him a case of vintage and you dedicate it to him, when he grows up, when he gets to the age that he discovers fine wine, fine vintage port, I guarantee, when he opens one of those bottles, he will remember you.

You can do that for a godson, you can do it for your children, you can give it to somebody who you like dearly.

Vintage port, not only being one of the great wines of the world which has the greatest expression of location, of year, it is also one of the best wines in the world to lay down, to put in your cellars.

To drink whenever you feel of an occasion to enjoy a good bottle of wine.

Well, Fonseca Bin 27 couldn't be closer to my heart. It is the port that my father launched in 1972. My first real memory of Bin 27 is when I was sitting around the dining table with my father. My father was making up the first mock-up bottle of Fonseca Bin 27, what was the way he wanted it to be taken to market. This was the original Bin 27 bottle. You take a normal bottle and you stencil the name Fonseca Bin 27 Port.

So, I actually helped him paint that first bottle, because although I was young at the time, I'm not sure my father was a great artist, but I remember that well. That became the reference, Fonseca Bin 27 package which got launched in 1972. But, it's very special for many other reasons.

We wanted to take to the market a port which had the characteristics of a young vintage port.

What is a young vintage port? It's a port with a lot of fruit, young berry, rich blackcurrant fruit, a lot of structure. The perfect combination with chocolate or with cheese, but for everyday drinking. That's what we have done in Fonseca Bin 27, and the reason why it's the number-one selling port in the United States. Because people enjoy it as such.

Here, we look at my family history. From Manoel Pedro Guimaraens, who was my ancestor, in fact very much Portuguese, who started working with João dos Santos Fonseca back in the early 19th century. It was, in fact, him who went to the UK and developed the house of Fonseca. João dos Santos Fonseca, in fact, left the business in his generation. So my family, the Guimaraens family, continued for the destinations of Fonseca exclusively from the 1840s forward.

I myself am called David Fonseca Guimaraens, because Manoel Pedro and such was his relationship with João dos Santos Fonseca, that the Fonseca name got introduced to his children and subsequently from there forward. Inevitably, Guimaraens is not an easy name to pronounce and Fonseca is a wonderful name and is continued as our house name.

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