A tour of Graham's Port Lodge. A tour guide explains the aging process and different types of port wines at Graham's cellar.

The guide mentions that the cellar has seven million liters of port aging, with the oldest wine dating back to 1882. He also discusses the different styles of port, such as Ruby and Tawny, and how they are aged differently to achieve specific flavors and characteristics.

The guide explains the process of bottling vintage ports and the significance of certain years, such as the first vintage port made by the Symington family in 1970.

The guide also mentions the different soils and methods used in the cellar to maintain the quality of the wines.

I hope you enjoy this 15 minute video.

THIS IS EPISODE 97 OF UNDERSTANDING WINE WITH AUSTIN BEEMAN

Special thanks:

CALHOUN & COMPANY COMMUNICATIONS - Michelle Keene

PREMIUM PORT WINES, INC - Ashley Marie-Maisel Zerpa

THE ENTIRE TEAM AT SYMINGTON FAMILY ESTATES

and Brianne Cohen.

Transcript:
Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words.’ Any persistent errors are mine alone.
Or, watch the video. It is awesome.

Graham's Tour Guide:

This is about seven million liters of port that we have here aging at the cellar. As I said, it's not everything, it's the majority because there's also a big part of the cellar where we have all of the bottles basically aging, so the commercial cellar of the company. That is not accessible, but we're going to see one of the cellars, in this case, the private collection of the family, which I'm sure that you're going to love it. Basically we just stopped here because I have this beautiful overview of the cellar, which was built in 1890. Since that time, all of the Grahams wines have been aging right here. The oldest, it is from 1882.

That's still here. It's not much left to be more precise. Two barrels, and I'm actually looking at them. We're going to pass by them and going to look at them actually closely because it's a very special wine for many different reasons. Not only because the wine is incredible, but because what it represents. Because this wine was actually bought by the first element of the family. These two barrels of port date back, as I said to 1882.

One of the barrels was bottled and you can still find it in our shop. If you're feeling, I don't know, you feel like you should, I will advise you to go for it obviously. These are incredible wines. Not only they taste great, these are wines that tell much more of a story because it's impossible not for your mind to wonder when you're drinking a wine like this and try to figure what was going on in the world at that time, how the world was and now this wine is in front of me.

For me, I feel like it's a really, really special thing. Not many things in the world can do that and wine is still one of those they can. His name was Andrew James Symington and was actually the first Symington to this site to come to Portugal. They were originally from Scotland, from Glasgow to be more precise. When he arrived, he arrived at time in 1882. He worked for a while as an accountant, which eventually he started to work closer to the business of port, but in different companies.

To be more precise again, Warre’s and Dow were the two first companies that he worked on, but he decided to buy a few barrels from its arrival time. That's how we still have some nowadays because he bought a few barrels at the beginning and the family's been capping them very closely and in 2014 they went with the bottling of one of those barrels. Nowadays, we have just two because one of the other four barrels was used just to refill these two that we have left.

Now it's a decision from the next generations. It might be bottled in 2025, but it might also be bottled in 2080. We never know. Again, it's a decision for the next generations of the family. What we really want again is to either expose the wine to oxidation or not, and that's the difference in size once more. Red ports, you have two big families. You have the Ruby ports and the Tawny ports. For the Rubies, what we are looking forward to, is to keep a youthful style.

Flavors that are much more primary. Flavors that come from the grape varieties. To protect those wines from oxidation and retaining those youthful flavors, we use bigger vats because we are reducing the surface of contact between the wine and the oak. By not having that much oxidation, we can retain the deeper color. Again, just primary berry, blackberry flavors and still a fairly good structure to find tannin in these wines.

Of course, depending on what we are trying to create in terms of subcategories of Rubies, we might keep it just for one year or two or we can keep it for six years, although there is just one that does it, which is the late bottle vintage. They can either be blended with different years to keep a consistency in style or they can be only of one year. The majority of the production will be wines without a year, mixes of different wines.

But for the Tawny's, we actually want the opposite. Tawny's, we want to remove completely those fruity, youthful flavors and replace them with tertiary flavors. Flavors that come from aging. That's why we use smaller casks. We are increasing the surface of contact. Much more air goes through the pores of the oak, the grain of the oak, and that way what you're going to have is instead of having a fresh plum flavor, you might start to feel like a prune flavor.

You start to get raisins, you start to get walnuts, almonds, spices like cinnamon, clove. It's beautiful especially when these wines rich age of like in 1940, when you get this very, very intense, nutty and spicy flavors. The color tends to get lighter over the times. Lighter, I would say not as deep dark color as you see a Ruby because once they achieve like 30 to 40 years, the colors actually start to become darker again. This time not like a dark red, it's more like a dark brown, almost like a cola-like color.

That is of course due to the caramelization of sugars and also the amount of wines that we are concentrating in the same barrel. Why is that? Because as these wines keep aging, we always lose some evaporation and that amount of wine that we lose through evaporation we have to replace. We keep topping up these barrels over the years. Eventually you are concentrating a lot and a lot of wine at the same barrel. That naturally will make the color of the wine become darker again.

Of course, as I said, it's not a youthful dark, it's much more of an aged intense brown dark color from that. Here we can already see also a few different types of Tawny ports. The Tawny ports mostly divide in two big categories. You have the Tawny's of age that are the ones that indicate the age on a label. They will say 10, 20, 30, 40 and now 50 years old Tawny and those are blends again of different years. What we're trying to show you is the character of that age.

Usually it's an average. We might have a little younger wines, a little bit older wines. Our goal is to match the flavor or to show you the best features that the wine of that age might show you. But sometimes we have wines that we believe they're showing something really, really unique and special and we don't want to lose that within a blend. We're going to bottle it separately. In those situations we can either call it in Portuguese Colheita or you can see it written in English saying single harvest Tawny ports.

We're using the best of the best that was produced in also our best properties in the best years. Those wines, they start their journey as the other Rubies. They stay inside of the big vats, but in this case for two years only. Think about those two years, almost like a trial. We are seeing if the wines reach the quality or if they have the quality that we really want them to have to be a vintage port. If they reach that quality, then we do a sample of the final blend and we're going to send it to the VDP.

The Institute of Douro Wines and Port Wines. After the wine goes through a lot of blind taste and analytic tests and they are sure that the wine is as high quality enough to be a vintage, they then will allow us to bottle. Then we'll have just about one year more to bottle everything. We do that bottling without filtering and clarifying. And clarification, sorry. Because of that we're going to keep a lot of the aging potential in the wine.

All of the other styles of Rubies or the majority of the other styles of Rubies are filtered. These are ones that don't benefit from extra time in the bottle once they get to. Vintage is almost solely done with that purpose. That's why it's only in the best years and it's not filtered at all. Once the wines are in the bottle, we're then going to let them rest for many years in our cellars. Of course a lot of people will tell you exactly the time that you should wait for a vintage port.

I think they should test for themself because we never know, we all have different talents. Some of us prefer them a little bit younger, fruitier. Some want to have more tertiary notes. Experience, try many different ranges of age and then you make your own. Here we already see some very special years. For example, just ahead of us here you can see the Grahams 2000 vintage ports. This is actually a very special vintage port to us because this was the first one that was made using the machines.

Almost all the ports before were not done with the machine, but this was the first vintage to be done that way. It marks the time that we started using the newer system. Of course turned out so well that we continue using it afterwards. There you can also see this distinction that we make in vintage ports that we call the classic vintages. You may heard already like this happened three times in a decade. The classic vintages is these three years in a decade that we select to being the best of the best.

Usually, for example, in the case of Grahams, what we do is we're going to get the best resulting wines from those five different properties they attach to it. We create almost a super wine with those grapes, with those wines. That's why you will always only see the name of the brand and the vintage year. That's because again, since you're using more than grapes from one property, you can't say that it's just for one. That's why you always see brand and year.

In the years in between, we still have very well-located properties that can achieve that quality. In our case here, the main property is Mulvige. I n the years in between of those classic vintages, we do what we call the single quinta vintage, and that's what you may see here on the left when it says Malvedos. Of course in the bottle will still say the brand, it will still say Grahams Malvedos vintage port. Usually this ones give you sometimes more of a sense of place of the property.

They're still amazing and incredible wines. It's just saying that in those years sometimes it's more difficult to find more high quality vintage ports. It's not as general as a classic vintage that it can almost enter into a wine shop blind and you always find a great bottle of port from that particular year. '97 was one of the classics. The other two for us were '94 and '91. Which '94, you'll be able to see it right away here.

Very special here. The best of the '90s, a lot of people say. Me included. Really, really great finds. Then we have the '80s. Here you have all the classics just in front of you, the '80, the '83 and the '85. Then we go a little bit later, not later, earlier, and we go with a 1977 and it gets older. '75, 1970, which again is a very special vintage. 1970 is a special vintage, not only because it tastes amazing and it's really, really good wine, but it was also the first wine of Grahams that was done by the Symington family.

Not first wine, but the first vintage port because we bought Grahams in 1970. Pretty brave and it turned out very well. Here, one of the legendary vintages, 1963. Really, really, really special here. Everyone that likes ports knows about this year because it's so, so great. Because I don't know if you notice, but it's also a very particular choice of soil within this cellar. In places where we have vats, you always have this white gravel because it stains really easily.

It's very easy to spot leaks on these vats. I'm sure that you already spot a few. It's okay. Again, we've been testing them so we know exactly what is going on. The other type of soil that you find is usually closer to the vat, any sand. Sand, it's a way to again keep moisture of the building and also help you to cool it down. Because in summer, even here it becomes a little bit warmer so we need to bring down the temperature. We still use a lot of these old methods that just work. Then we have high roofs, just so they work as a heat trap. Everything here is meant to keep these wines in top shape. Every single thing that we do has a crucial role in the final product. The wines aging always here since they're beginning also gives a little touch to the style of the wines.

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