HARVEST REPORT 2006

Dirk Niepoort travels a lot during the year but during Harvest we can find him in DOURO looking after the port wines with Nick in Vale Mendiz or taking care of the still wines with Luís in Quinta de Ñápoles.

In the following a brief report about the Harvest 2006 in Vale Mendiz (port wine) and in Quinta de Nápoles (Still wines) documented with some Fotos from Dirk.

Vale de Mendiz by Nick Delaforce

In Vale de Mendiz , 2006 will be remembered for the very violent hail storm in the middle of June, which swept through vineyards with thunderstorms accompanied by intense rain and large hailstones all in the space of half an hour. The damage in vineyards was substantial and even though vineyards recovered reasonably well, the loss of quantity was evident at harvest time.

The agricultural year, yet again, was fairly dry and the summer relatively hot; a few solid showers in mid August and high temperatures, followed by unseasonally high temperatures in early September meant maturity in the vineyard raced ahead at the beginning of the month.

Having expected to start harvest in mid September, the start date was brought forward to the 9th September so as to avoid fruit becoming over ripe. Temperatures remained high during the first two weeks of the harvest, even overnight temperatures rarely dropping below 20º C, thus creating difficult conditions for maturity to reach completion in the vineyard. With the earlier start to vintage, the majority of the grapes were harvested before the rain which as from the 21st September fell intermittently over the following days along with a very heavy shower on 2nd October. The last grapes were received at Vale de Mendiz on 8th October.

Given the less than ideal weather conditions the fermenting musts exhibited good colour and a few small parcels of very fine wines have certainly been made. From an analytical perspective the musts had high pHs and required considerable tartaric acid corrections.

It will be very interesting to taste the wines in the spring of 2007, when a better overall picture of the quality of the year will emerge.

Picking up grapes

Picking up grapes 

Foodtreading in the Stone lagares

Foodtreading in the Stone lagares

Quinta de Nápoles by Luís Seabra

The violent hale that occurred in the Pinhão valley and in other nearby areas didn’t affect the majority of the vineyards we use for Douro wines. After the last three very dry and hot years, 2006 winter was fairly good with substantial amount of water with almost 380 mm of total precipitation during all winter in Cima Corgo region,

During the vine cycle until verasion we had a fairly hot spring but also with higher humidity, that increased the diseases present in the vineyards. The summer was quite hot with average temperatures of 23.2ºC, 26.1ºC and 25.6ºC in June, July and August respectively.

A few days of rain in middle August was perfect for grape maturations, but uncommon high temperatures during the last week of August and 2 first weeks of September, not only during the day but also through the nights, forced us to bring forward the Harvest to 4th September. Using higher altitude and north facing vineyards it was possible to get quite balanced wines with fairly good PH’s and sugar contents in the musts.

The Major part of harvest was done before the first rains in 21st September, and we managed to finish the harvest before the heavy rains of October.

All the harvest was done in order to avoid over ripeness and over extraction, the fermentation was done gently avoiding high temperatures, the final results are red wines with good alcohol content, balanced with good structure, some of them showing great potential. Strangely in the white wines the alcohol levels are not so high, showing much more discrete aromas where the mineral notes dominate overall, certainly interesting to taste during ageing in barrel.

:-)