Portugal has as long a history of winemaking as any country in Europe. Unfortunately, most modern wine drinkers know it for only one wine, Port – a special niche wine if there ever was one. The best Ports have an almost cult following, but most winos consider them as heavy, super-sweet, and old-fashioned – think quaint pictures of vineyard workers still crushing grapes by foot, and Victorian vicars passing carafes of old Port along with their cigars.
While the foot-stomping for Port still occurs, many other aspects of Portuguese winemaking are much more up-to-date. This tiny country may harbor as many indigenous grape varieties as Italy, and many of its producers are moving as fast as they can to reclaim its once sizable share of world wine markets. In rural districts, you can still see the occasional oxcart on the road, but nowadays you’re just as likely around the next bend to happen on large, temperature-controlled, stainless-steel fermenters and wineries with well-equipped, up-to-the-minute testing and laboratory equipment.
Portugal’s wine output is tremendously varied, and I haven’t the space – or the current knowledge – to survey it all. What I want to talk about is one great producer, the acknowledged master of Bairrada – which is both the name of a district and the Portuguese equivalent of its DOC. That’s Luis Pato, and the grape that makes his wines is Portugal’s indigenous Baga.
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Baga is a difficult variety: Some producers say impossible. In Wine Grapes, Jancis Robinson’s brief entry on Baga describes it as a “controversial, demanding Portuguese variety capable of making great, ageworthy wines.” It can, she says, “make the best of wines and the worst of wines.” Much depends on whether the growing season stays dry long enough for Baga to reach full ripeness. Short of complete ripeness, its tannins can be brutal. But in the best vintages, Baga makes a wine that may be austere in youth but matures into a rich, fascinatingly complex mouthful of flavors that range from forest floor through a whole bowl of fruits to tobacco and smoke. These are amazingly long-lived wines, and can go on for years at their peak of flavor.
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Luis Pato is the master of this kind of Baga. A no-nonsense kind of guy, he recently withdrew from the Bairrada DOC because he couldn’t stand all the politicking it involved, so his newest releases no longer say Bairrada anywhere on the label. I was lucky enough just a few months ago to be able to buy, at a quite reasonable price (don’t ask), a small cache of 2000 and 2001 vintages of some of Pato’s bottlings. He does several, each representing a different vineyard: He even bottles one, called Quinto do Ribeirinho Pé, with grapes from a pre-phylloxera vineyard. I had the good fortune to taste this 30 or so years ago, when I visited Luis Pato – its intensity is still vivid in my memory – but I have never seen a bottle of it here in the US (and probably couldn’t afford it if I did).
What I did recently acquire was his 2001 Vinha Barrio and 2000 Quinta do Moinho, both for me rarities and treasures.
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As my regular readers will know, I’m very skeptical of the value of tasting notes (they’re true for one person, one time, under a set of peculiar circumstances), but I can’t resist giving you my reaction to the Quinta do Moinho:
Big big big! Lots of semi-soft tannins. Black currants, berries and coffee in the mouth (coffee in the nose). Only 12.5% alcohol, but it feels much bigger – not hot, but mouth-filling and complex. Long coffee/berry finish. A fine, quite distinctive wine. Served with a risotto of mushrooms, onions, and Spanish chorizo. The cheese course (Pont l’Eveque and Taleggio) brought up all the wine’s sweet fruit – cherry/berry, quite fresh. This wine seems to have decades yet to go.
In discussions of Pato’s wines, you sometimes run across very esoteric comments comparing his Bagas to Bordeaux wines, with finely nuanced arguments for their more greatly resembling Cabernet-based left-bank wines or fruitier right-bank wines. I don’t see that at all: these Baga wines seem to me distinctive, quite different in character and flavor from French, or Spanish or Italian reds.
That distinctiveness was reinforced for me on an evening when we paired lamb chops and chanterelles with Pato’s 2001 Vinha Barrio. That vineyard has been since replanted, but when this wine was vinified, the Barrio vineyard was Pato’s oldest: head-trained vines, ranging between 80 and 100 years of age.
They yielded another extraordinary wine. It felt huge in the mouth despite a modest 13% of alcohol, and it had a heady aroma – tobacco, coffee, pine duff, multiple forest and forest floor scents. All these also showed up on the palate, plus – to my total surprise – apple and other white fruits! With the lamb, it was all polish and depth: dark fruits, tobacco, dried berries, especially black raspberry.
Old vines can almost always surprise: here, a mature nose combined with a very fresh palate – in all, a wine of intriguing paradoxes, tasting to me nothing like any Bordeaux wine, much less any Barolo, to which it is also often compared. Pato’s wines are sui generis, and a very distinguished genus it is. I think you can see why, despite my distrust of tasting notes, I needed to present these to give you some sense of the complexity and caliber of Pato’s wines.
I too have long enjoyed these wines, which I first encountered on a trip to Portugal with Pat Iocca. We did sample the Pe and I remember it being so delicious. Sounds like you did score with these two wines.
Indeed I did: one of the best buys I’ve made in a long time.