Fonseca’s Port of the Future

“I hate sterile antiseptic wines made by technicians. Wine must be natural!” said David Guimaraens, chief winemaker of the sister Port houses of Fonseca and Taylor. The words shot out of his stocky frame with passion.

Strangely, while the 33-year-old winemaker denounced newfangled winemaking trends--must concentration, oak additives--we were standing among stainless steel tanks and ultra-modern filtration equipment in the Fonseca lodge, or cellars, in this suburb of Oporto. He had just explained that this room is where Fonseca’s biggest production wine, the Vintage Character “Bin 27,” is cold-stabilized and filtered so that it won’t throw a sediment.

He recognized the irony. “Winemaking is the art of combining tradition--the things which are important for wine quality,” he said, “with modernity--techniques that are cost-efficient, enabling you to offer the consumer a good product at a modest price.” Fonseca’s “Bin 27” is certainly that, being priced well under $20 per bottle but having the rich black plum flavor, raisiny sweetness and supple tannins that you expect from a good Port.

He also showed me a sample of “Bin 27” from a lot that had not been cold-stabilized and filtered. It was more vibrantly aromatic but also slightly aggressive. “The wine does lose some flavor through this treatment but also becomes smoother,” he said.

“The only important thing is the quality in the glass. I will not rest until ‘Bin 27’ is as good as the lots of wine that we now consider for inclusion in top bottlings.” This is an ambitious goal when you consider that “Bin 27” is a wine made on a large scale: nearly half a million bottles a year.

This ambition has its roots in Australia, where Guimaraens studied at the Roseworthy viticultural school and worked at two prominent vineries, Brown Brothers and St. Hallet. “It was in Australia that I discovered my passion for wine,” he told me, with a fire that made it sound as if it were only yesterday.

“The Australians have done more to improve the quality of everyday drinking wines around the world than anyone else. They have awakened winemakers everywhere to the importance of ripe fruit flavors and hygiene in the cellar.”

Clearly another newfangled trend he can approve of. And yet Port, to many people the most traditional of wines, has seen great changes. It was created about 1750 when somebody stopped the fermentation of red wine from the Upper Douro region of Portugal by adding brandy, leaving the wine sweet. And what we call Vintage Port was invented in the 1820s, when English merchants started bottling the top of the vintage after two years in barrel, requiring it to age for 20 years or longer to be drinkable. Before that time, all Port was aged in barrels for a number of years and was drinkable when bottled--in other words, all Port was originally what we call Ruby or Tawny today.

Guimaraens is the winemaker for both Fonseca and Taylor, but the two Port houses retain different styles, largely because they get their grapes from separate properties in the Upper Douro wine country. Right through the range, Taylor’s Ports are firmer and drier than the opulently rich Fonseca wines. The distinction is as great today as it was before 1948, when the Guimaraens family sold Fonseca to Taylor.

Grapes have posed challenges in recent years because of extensive replanting in the Upper Douro in the late 1980s; young vines give less consistently expressive and powerful wines than old vines. But the challenges seem to have been met, to judge from the 1994 Fonseca LBV (Late Bottled Vintage), a big, rich, polished Port which, unlike most LBVs, really has some of the power and generosity of Vintage Port--and, unlike the monumental 1994 Fonseca Vintage Port, is already delicious without the traditional decades of waiting.

It is hard to imagine anyone not being impressed by that gigantic opaquely black-purple wine. Despite its mouth-filling plum and mulberry flavors and huge tannins, there is nothing abrupt or obvious about the ’94 Fonseca Vintage Port. Rather, it has a clarity and precision of flavor not unlike the clean sharp lines of a botanical print. And if you have the patience, long bottle aging will transform it into a seductive masterpiece similar to the 1963 Fonseca Vintage Port.

An alternative that is more affordable is the Guimaraens’ Vintage Port, which Fonseca produces in years when the wines do not quite reach the level that the company sets itself for its top wine. The current release is the 1986, which has all the qualities of the 1994 Fonseca Vintage Port on a smaller scale and the mellowness that 10 years of bottle age gives. The balance of opulent sweetness and abundant tannin is almost perfect, and the only thing that can improve the experience is a piece of blue cheese or a good cigar.

In fact, the cigar craze is one of the factors that has powered the extraordinary recent growth in Port sales in the U.S. The consumption of LBV Port and premium Tawny Ports has quadrupled since 1992, and American sales of Vintage Port exceed those in the United Kingdom, the traditional market for these wines.

“America could be a 1 million-case Port market within five years, and most of that will be premium quality,” Adrian Bridge, new president of Taylor and Fonseca, said excitedly. “That is good news for us, because the goal is for all our grapes to become Vintage Port. This means that, instead of having a pyramid of products ascending to a narrow peak that is a little bit of Vintage Port, we produce a pyramid of products with a broad summit that is a serious quantity of Vintage Port.”

*

Pigott is a British journalist and wine writer.