Wine Making at our Quinta
We have just finished the first part of making our own wine here at Quinta do Cobral, the second stage is to wait for it to mature. It will then be boxed up ready for drinking but that won't be for quite a while. The process is a bit laborious but, as you know, the best things always take a while, require some work and lots of love (with a bit of finger crossing and praying too!).
Images showing the planting, tidying and weeding of our new baby vinyard way back in 2014
This is the third year of making wine and we have had mixed success so far. The first year we were able to pick our grapes, they were only planted in November 2014 and it takes 3 years before you can even pick a bunch, was in September 2018 after a very hot summer. With more luck than judgement it worked very well and we made a very passable table wine, all be it very, very strong as the grapes were so sweet (in fact it was a bit more like a cross between wine and Port!). We did not realise that you can add water to the pressed juice after/or during the first fermentation, if the alcohol levels are going to be high due to lots of sugar in the fruit.
The second year was not so good, we had more grapes and they were of good quality but we added too much water so the resulting wine did not have a lovely dark colour and was a bit watery.
So roll along 2020, the third year of production and Rik is determined that we are going to learn some lessons from the last 2 years and make the best wine yet.
Firstly pick your grapes..... Sounds obvious doesn't it? but we have had another very hot summer with no rain and we also suffered from a wet winter and early spring. This meant we lost quite a few of our grapes due to mildew (probably about a third) and the ones left on the plants were small and intensely sweet. Rik discovered another vineyard the other side of our village which has lovely mature vines but has not had much care, the owner did not want to bother picking and let us take the grapes that there were there, not masses but a real help. We then picked ours, a mixture of both red and white which we put together.
The grapes are then picked over and stripped of their stalks, finally being ground up through Riks wonderful homemade grape crusher, it used to be a Black and Decker mulcher it its previous life but with a little modification, welding and bashing around it works brilliantly. The resultant mush is bucketed into the first fermentation barrel, a huge plastic bin with a lid to keep the flies out. The lid goes on and it starts to do its thing. We don't add anything, no yeast or extra sugars, we allow the natural yeasts on the skins to create the fermentation for us. It starts to ferment very quickly and Riks workshop soon starts to smell like an old pub after a busy weekend!
After 8 days in the barrel it's time to see what we have and extract the juice so it can go into our 500L stainless steel fermentation vessel for the final stage. This year we used a small pump that Rik brought in Lidl and, after straining the stray bits of skin and pips through a bit of mosquito netting, it did the hard work of transporting the new wine from the barrel in Riks workshop to the stainless vessel in the garage without having to use buckets and sloshing it everywhere! The colour was fabulous, a gorgeous dark red and it tasted very, very good. Slightly fizzy, but only a tiny bit so most of the vigorous fermentation had definitely taken place, and a pleasant, fruity taste which all bodes well for the future - we hope.
The last job of the day was to scoop our all the remaining pips, skins and final drops of liquid from the barrel into the grape press to take out every last bit of liquid. Its incredible how much you still get out at this stage! The resultant, rather dry looking, skin and pip cake is then bucketed up and taken to the still in a neighbouring village to get turned into Aguadente (Fire water is the direct translation from Portuguese), which is the clear, distilled spirit that most grape producing countries make from the left overs. We plan to try and recreate some of the more palatable pear or coffee liquors that are commonly made in all the households here. Some are wonderful, some not so good, I shall report back on what ours is like.
So fingers crossed it will be a good year for the Quinta do Cobral 2020 vintage, we think we have about 250 litres so it would be very nice if it tasted good!! Come and visit and help us try it out.
A very quick PS, to those of you who do follow social media (I have to for the business sadly) I took advantage of the lock down here March to June and did a course on Instagram, I now have two new Instagram pages one for our little rental house and one for my courses. This definitely explains why I have been so tardy in doing blogs his year - sorry! If you want to follow them they are:
@quintadocobral and @quintacourses
Please leave a comment I love to hear what you think and, again, I apologise for not blogging sooner.