Taylor's recently flew their top winemakers, David Gimaraeans, Pedro and the MD, Adrian Bridge to London to give a presentation at Vinopolis on their new Port winemaking techniques. The timing was perfect as the seminar happened just after the Taylor Fonseca group announced their purchase of the Port interests of Croft and Delaforce, reported elsewhere in this Update. Coincidentally, I visited the Douro at the end of September courtesy of John E Fells to see the robotic lagars installed by the Symingtons at their new winemaking centre, Quinta do Sol and at two of there other quintas, Malvedos and Senhora de Ribeira, opposite Vesuvio. It is timely therefore to consider the requirements for Port wine production and compare the Taylor and Symington systems.
Before looking at the latest developments it is worth looking at the background to them for the prototype in both cases is the same, treading itself. We know from ancient painting that treading grapes to make wine has gone on since before biblical times. Once, the human foot was the only way of extracting the juice from grapes, black or white, but only in the Douro does it continue today for commercial production. The reason is extraction not of the juice but of the colour and tannin from the skins. Treading is not replaced by crushing, nor by pressing; the lagar is the fermentation vessel. A good tread results in a deeply-coloured must as fermentation begins, not, as with red wine, at the end. Hence the tradition of three distinct stages to treading. During the cut the treaders line up across the larger in three or four rows, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm and march on the spot to the monotonous rhythm of the foreman shouting one two or left, right. Other than the increasingly hoarse voice of the centeiro, this stint is performed in silence with due respect for the foreman.
Every so often the lines will move one step forward or back to work another line of the mash. This is change of position results in a new set of grapes being broken up. They are noticeably more solid and considerably colder than the previous batch.
When liberdade is called all the treaders dance around the lagar in party mood, but this is not just fun. Two hours of movement stirs up all this grapes that were missed in the cut and feet squeezing the grapes on the bottom of the lagar is still extracting colour and tannin. As a treader it is very noticeable that there are still cold spots, and, particularly around the corners, still areas where the grape mass is still quite solid. Come midnight the dancing stops and the now warm must is left to start fermenting.
By the following morning the skins have usually floated to the surface. There should be no whole grapes left, just a mash of broken up skins and juice. As the fermentation progresses a cap will form, perhaps more like a crust given the size and shape of it. This will be submerged over the next day or so by men with special punching-down poles that look like deformed telegraph poles called monkeys or macacos, until the correct colour and sugar levels are reached. The traditional, if perhaps accidental design of the lagar has a number of built-in advantages. Quite apart from the physical breaking-up if the skins by the treaders' feet, the shallow vat aids extraction and the slight aeration aids yeast development and helps fix colour in the finished wine. This colour fixing has been recognised in the design of both the Taylor and Symington machines.
The labour shortages today are caused not by far-away strife but local prosperity. Sons and daughters of today's farm hands are educated and rightly ambitious, jobs in Porto or Lisbon along with a modern lifestyle is far more appealing than the hard work in the Douro. New impetus has been given to the search for newer methods.
Robots and Port sound an unlikely combination, but they have a surprisingly along history. John Smithes experimented with a contraption in the sixties. To the best of my knowledge, no photographs or diagrams exist but the descriptions I have heard make it sound like something Heath Robinson could be proud of. One (rival) producer told me that it just fell short of having boots tied on to squash the grapes. More recently Noval have converted one of their lagars by installing rails and a "robot" that resembles the top of miniaturized gantry crane. The advantage of this over punching down in a vat is the shallowness of the vat. Like aeration, the ratio of the depth to the width is something both the Symingtons and the Taylor Fonseca machines have had to address.
So what of the latest methods? The David and Perdo at Taylor's have spent a huge amount of time and money experimenting with punching down in tanks, in an attempt to mimic the action of the foot in a lagar using a development of standard wine- making equipment. Punching-down tanks can now be found in many other parts of the world, but here a far greater extraction rate is required. Experiments showed that two design features were essential, the ratio of depth to width had top be similar to that in the lagar, and a certain amount of contact with the air was beneficial, so open- topped fermenters were required. A number of prototypes were built, initially with compressed air actuators, and closed tops, but finally open-topped and shallow.
The experimentation included a great deal of systematic tasting and scoring of the wines. In all cases industrial quantities of grapes were used, this was not micro- vinification of mollycoddled grapes. Batches of grapes were separated into equal quantities and then processed so the terrior aspect was removed from the variables. Taking lagars as their base line 100% the winemakers judged pumping over to give about 60% of the required quality, and as the prototypes developed the scores for foot or machine processing got closer and closer. The resulting wines were shown in a tasting in London and the development and improvement as we tasted through the various prototypes was quite clear. The last pair, lagar versus the latest P4 prototype should have been shown blind, the difference was so small.
The final design is a round, broad vat, slightly deeper than the traditional lager, built on legs with a sloped base to facilitate emptying. The cap is punched down by hydraulic action, the actuators being placed on the sides of tank in case of leaks.
The Symington answer is rather different. Their robotic lagars look like nothing used in any other winery. A bank of stainless steel lagars, three or four at a time, each temperature controlled and built on a tipping mechanism to speed emptying, is worked by a gantry robot. This moves from one lagar to the next, pre-programmed to tread either to the bottom of the tank, as with the initial treading in the stone lagares, or to tread only half way, not touching the bottom but turning the cap as with macacos, but of course far more reliably and efficiently.
Since their introduction for commercial Port production with the 2000 vintage – a significant proportion of the Graham's 2000 was robotically trodden, they have found favour with other producers. Burmeister have bought into the system already, and a number of other producers look likely to follow suit.
Port lovers the world over love the idea, and tourists would be fascinated, but, unlike hand remuage in Champagne, it is not a tourist attraction, because this is not a great tourist area. Pinhão now has a decent hotel, and there are other places to stay, but tourism in the area is still in its infancy, and most of the quintas that tread are not open to tourists anyway. There will always be some traditionalists, and where the quinta has a large resident population of pickers at harvest time, treading will probably continue, but as time goes by, one or other of these systems, or developments of them, will surely take over.
Comparing the two is not easy. Both undoubtedly produce great wines, as good as, it not better than traditional lagares. The Taylor system is far cheaper, but perhaps the wine is not quite as good. Commercial decisions will have to be made by the quintas in their choice. For the moment at least it appears there are two more weapons in the Port makers armoury, both equally valid it for different reasons.