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Quinta do Vesuvio, Vintage Port 1999
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Description
About the Producer
History Historical records refer to the immense diversity of Vesúvio as far back as 1565, describing its orange, lemon, almond, olive and fig trees. It remained a wild, untamed landscape for many years, as much of it still is. 1830 after a spectacular harvest in the Douro, António Bernardo Ferreira I renamed his Quinta das Figueiras as Quinta do Vezúvio. Over the previous seven years, he had invested his life and wealth into the property. And then, during the harvest of 1830, his Quinta bore its first fruit. Bernardo bought the property from the Viscount de Lapa in 1823, at that time called Quinta das Figueiras. He set up many long-term transformation objectives. It took his team of five hundred workers thirteen years to carve vineyards out of the steep slopes and plant thousands of vines. But his visionary modernization efforts transformed the Douro, and some years later, the wines from Quinta do Vesúvio would command the highest prices of any Portuguese wine in the United Kingdom, which was the most important market for wine at that time. In 1827, he built the monumental winery, with its eight granite lagares, each holding 24 pipes of wine, its oak beams and substantial chestnut vats, each capable of holding the equivalent of one lagar of Port. This original winery is where Vesuvio’s Port is still made today. Terroir Quinta do Vesúvio is situated far upriver in the Douro Superior. Its special reputation for producing outstanding wines goes back to the nineteenth century, when the Viscount of Villa Maior wrote, “All this wine is made scrupulously and to perfection… this Quinta was made as if for princes….” Vesúvio has a total area of 326 hectares (806 acres), of which 133 hectares (329 acres) are planted with vines. The rest, almost two-thirds, has been conserved in its natural, wild state. Many other things grow at Vesúvio besides vines: oranges, lemons, figs, almonds, walnuts, grapefruits, pomegranates and many more exotic fruits and herbs. Vesúvio also has significant variations in altitude, from 130 metres at the riverside to 530 metres at the top of the ridge. Being so far inland, the Quinta experiences climatic extremes, reaching very high temperatures in summer and very low in winter. It is extremely dry, with an average of only 400mm of rain falling each year. Vesúvio specializes in making remarkable Vintage Ports and Douro D.O.C red wines. The Symington family, the leading winemakers in the Douro Valley, makes all Vesúvio’s wine. The nineteenth-century winery is one of the largest in the Douro and one of the last places on earth where grapes are still trodden by human feet, according to a time-honoured art practised for centuries and millennia.
