This year was cooler and wetter than normal. We saw a generous dose of the usual April showers, an unusually wet second half of June and a freak hail storm mid-June that wiped out many of our neighbours’ burgeoning grape clusters, but sparred Quinta do Tedo.
August brought on those scorching 40 C / 105 F days that hold up to the local saying that “one year in Douro Valley is made up of nine months of winter and three months of hell”, but only for a week or so. The rest of summer was mild, with cool and windy nights that (thanks also to our new Viticulturist, Angêlo) warded off oidium and mildew from our healthily maturing organic grapes.
Deciding when to pick was a bit tricky with clouds looming over our harvest forecast. We are used to local weather predictions being incompatible with reality (someone, get those meteorologists a shot of espresso!), but also understand that Douro’s various river, slope, valley and hilltop microclimates make it hard - it could be sunny at Tedo and raining 15 minutes upriver in Pinhão.
We called harvest on August 31- that’s slightly earlier than usual and nearly a month earlier than 100+ years ago! Back then, producers cherished overripe grapes’ high sugar content and alcohol potential; today, we seek freshness and balance from perfectly ripe grapes. We started with our vinhas velhas - 40-65+-year-old field blends with deep root systems, low yields and small berries that achieve riper tannins and more concentration sooner. One cannot ignore a beautiful grape cluster shouting “pick me!”
Harvest was stop-and-go as we waited for the prime time to pick our different vineyard parcels and 18+ native grape varieties between rain and sun over the next two weeks. Our thirsty vines slurped up just enough water to lend a boost of juice and acidity to our grapes, whose sugars re-concentrated during intermittent sunny days.
On September 14th, we celebrated the last pick with our harvest team, a glass of Fine Tawny and Staff Cook Adelaide’s homemade fritas (flat doughnuts dusted in cinnamon-sugar) and impromptu fado by Carlota, a picker from nearby Folgosa. 2021’s abundant yields of healthy grapes will make for delicious Ports and Douro DOC wines!
Each harvest is different - such is the nature, the beauty and the challenge of the wine industry. What doesn’t change is the excitement, the hard work and the celebration harvest time brings. After a very quiet 2020, we were so happy to share this with others.
We received a joyful helping hand in our vineyards and lagares from nearby Armamar’s folkloric group, Rogas Para o Douro, and the first participants in our inaugural Half-Day Harvest Experience with owner Kay Bouchard.
Historically, rogas were groups of 40 to 50 men, women and children who traversed kilometres on foot from small hilltop villages and neighbouring regions to pick and foot-tread grapes in sweltering heat at Douro Valley’s Quintas.
Traditional chants, daily rations of fried fish (cheaper than meat), soup, massa lavradora (hearty pasta with beans) and jug wine, and chit-chat through the grapevines with friends and family fueled them through backbreaking days from sunrise to sunset. They also received lowly accommodation and (sometimes) pay, but what these workers cherished most was the opportunity to escape their everyday lives for a few weeks in this magical region that we who spend so much time here sometimes take for granted.
At the end of harvest, the rogas thanked Quinta owners with song, dance and a pole decorated with flowers, grapes, colourful paper and dangling rebuçado candies (women still make and sell these outside Régua’s train station!) While these were the days of Salazar’s dictatorship, Douro’s strongly upheld caste system was considered particularly backwards even by Portuguese standards.
I asked the folkloric group’s women how they could stand the heat, picking grapes in wool socks and multi-layered dresses. These protected them from bug bites but also hid their relieving themselves under their dresses, as their overseer allowed them no bathroom breaks. The men wore stiff leather shoes and carried 60-70 kg woven basketfuls of grapes on their shoulders up steep terraces to the beat of a drum.
Foot-treading in the lagares, which is still considered the best way to extract grapes’ finer and less bitter qualities, was a men-only job. Starting with the corte, they silently walked in a tight line shoulder-to-shoulder back and forth. Then, during the liberdade, they chanted and danced around freely to the cadence of the accordion-like concertina and drum.
Two members of the folkloric group told that while 60 years ago there were 40 students in their tiny nearby town’s primary school, today there are just two. With the loss of Douro’s youth to cities in search of better schools, jobs and wages, we risk losing this local workforce and the valuable and very much undocumented heritage they hold.
While Quinta do Tedo has kept a close rapport with nearby towns from which our invaluable workforce comes, some other Quintas have resorted to contracting cheaper migrant workers. We strive to work with locals in building a Douro Valley future that they can see themselves happy, healthy, successful and valued in and we are honoured to support and showcase this folkloric group’s efforts to preserve the details of their wonderful traditions.
We encourage you to find out more about these traditions by visiting the Museu do Douro in Régua, by reading Portugal’s 19th-century literary giant Miguel Torga’s “Vindima” (“Grape Harvest” in its translated form), and by watching the 2021 documentary “A Wonderful Kingdom” (available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime).
