PART 2 of Quinta do Crasto interviews with Manuel Lobo de Vasconcellos, winemaker and oenologist at Crasto. Quinta do Crasto is in the Douro Valley in northern Portugal, the region best known for port wine, the Portuguese fortified wine. But it is also a wine country that makes excellent table wines.
So, how do they do the winemaking at Quinta do Crasto? They follow a very practical philosophy of making wines: Very high quality grapes from the vineyards to make high quality wines. They make both a fortified port wine and a range of table wines, red and white. At Quinta do Crasto they also believe in using local traditional Portuguese grape varieties.
For the vinification and the work in the winery they dont follow any specific recipe for how to do thing, they see how each vintage is and adapt to the climate and the grapes. The winemaking is about common sense, as Manuel says. Above all they like to respect the fruit in the wine.
They use both very modern winemaking technology and also very old: both temperature controlled stainless steel tanks and old concrete lagares. Manuel explains in detail how they work with treading the grapes in the lagares: either mechanical treading or manual treading by men walking on the grapes and crushing them with their feet. The first treading is always done by men, by real feet.
Crasto also makes a wine called Xisto Roquette e Cazes, made in collaboration with Jean-Michel Cazes. Manuel explains what is different in the winemaking between what they do traditionally in the Douro and what is the tradition in in Bordeaux (where Cazes comes from, Chateau Lynch Bages and other), and how this collaboration means that they both learn from each other.
This interview was made at the European Wine Bloggers Conference #EWBC 2009 in Lisbon: https://winebloggersconference.org/europe/
More on Quinta do Crasto: https://www.quintadocrasto.pt/uk/intro.htm
Music: Kaleidoscope, Sol e dad, https://www.jamendo.com
By BKWine, https://www.bkwine.com. Interviewer: Per Karlsson, BKWine. © Copyright BKWine, Per Karlsson.
