Picking the grapes

A tasting awaits in Pinhão!

Quinta do Noval vineyards

The Port Harvest, Wine & City

15 - 18 September 2011

Get a group of at least 8 people together at harvest time in 2012 and we will arrange this Port Harvest Wine tour just for you! This tour is a great Arblaster & Clarke original. Witness and take part in the Port harvest with the unique opportunity to experience treading the grapes! Treading the Port grapes is not just done for tourists, it continues to be how the greatest Ports are made.

We will meet in Oporto, and on the first evening have a private tutored tasting. We stay in a central 3* hotel in Oporto, for the duration of the wine tour and there is an opportunity to upgrade to the 4*, with a river view room. (For those who don’t speak Portuguese, “O” is the masculine definite article in Portuguese, so Oporto, which is the English name for the city, is simply a running together of the port’s eponymous name, plus the definite article).

In the morning we visit the British owned lodges: Taylors for a tasting at their historical lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia (on the banks of the Douro directly opposite Oporto. Our next visit is at the Grahams lodge for an outstanding tasting from their various Port houses to show the style and range from Ruby through to Vintage. We enjoy lunch at a small traditional restaurant next door with some of the Symington family table wines.

Next day we go up to the Port wine vineyards up the beautiful Douro valley. We make the journey by the local train which makes its way through the hills before snaking along next to the river. It’s traditional (with Arblaster & Clarke) to toast the Douro with a glass of Port when the vineyards come in sight. (Well it will be mid morning by this time!). The journey was made famous by Michael Palin as one of his “Great Railway Journeys’. Several of us in the office have done this journey many times, and the first sight of the Douro River and the vineyards reflected in its deep,slow running waters is truly just as exciting every time we see it. (Lynette Arblaster & Tim Clarke first did this stunning train journey along the Douro Valley on their honeymoon nearly 25 years ago and have been escorting and sending clients out to the region every year on our superb Portuguese wine tours ever since).

In the Douro we visit two of the cutting edge Douro table wine and Port producers. Both are members of the informal association of about five small, rising star producers known as ‘The Douro boys’.

We arrive in Pinhão, in the heart of the Classic Cima Corgo sub-region and from here we go first we go to the Dutch family owned firm of Niepoort. They are perhaps the ultimate craft Port lodge, famed especially for their superb old tawny and colheita (dated tawny) ports, the product of long ageing in barrel and careful blending and selection in their cellars down in Vila Nova de Gaia. We’ll see that Niepoort’s success is also based on their traditonal treading of the grapes, great winemaking and before that attention to the vineyard.

We then continue up the Pinhão River side valley to the lovely Quinta do Passadouro. Here we are invited for a harvest lunch. If the weather is very fine this will be at tables on their lawn with its superb views over the vineyards and valley. Quinta do Passadouro which used to be commercialised as a ‘single quinta’ (single estate) by Niepoort, don’t make any tawny style at all, only LBV and vintage, plus good red table wines.

Both these two quintas crush their entire harvest by foot, and if you wish, you too can join in the treading! – Just be sure that you never want to wear these clothes again and that you don’t mind having dark red legs for a few days!

Niepoort, long renowned for their ports, also produce a range of superb Douro table wines including without doubt the best white wines made in the Douro. At Passadouro, Jorges Borges the winemaker is a specialist in table wines and his Passadouro reds are superb. He is also behind the superb ‘Pintas’ table wine which he makes with his wife, (another of the Douro ‘boys’). So, on this trip you will also taste several excellent tables wines which is really what the buzz is all about in this region, not “just” Port. (Though of course, Port remains perhaps the greatest fortified wine on earth!).

After lunch we make our way back down to Oporto, perhaps enjoying a glass of Douro Moscatel or something else rather interesting on the journey! The evening is free for you to choose your own restaurant. There are many interesting restaurants in Oporto, especially down by the riverfront Ribera – many serving the typical dishes of grilled sardines or other fish specialities. The people from Lisbon are on the rude side about the people from Oporto – calling them “os tripeiros”, the “tripe eaters”, and indeed you can still find this dish in the traditional restaurants and of course, cooked well like any national dish in the hands of experts, it is superb. The people from Oporto return the compliment to their friends down in Lisbon by calling them the “alfacinhas” or the little lettuces on account of it having been the market garden of Portugal in the past.
More such friendly banter is exchanged – with the ditty claiming that “Porto works, Coimbra studies, Braga prays and Lisbon plays”.

On the last day there will be a morning visit to Calem Port. This is a Portuguese owned house with excellent quality for both Tawny and Vintage style ports – the tour will finish at midday. If you would like to extend your holiday this is possible in the Douro Valley or even continueing to Lisbon for a few days – please do call if you would like to discuss.

We stay in a small 3* hotel in the centre of Oporto, within easy walking distance of the river front (Ribera) with its many restaurants. This is a very unusual and special weekend, everyone who is interested in wine should see the Port vintage once and dive into the vat to experience grape treading!

Please see our video of our Port Harvest Wine Tour: