6 Things You Don’t Know About Oscar Quevedo

I was recently tagged in an internet meme from Catavino, in which I had to write 6 things people would not know about me. I used to receive email memes in which someone would tell me that if I forwarded the message to some of my contacts I would receive a postcard, a call from a forgotten friend or something special. I usually delete these emails but as this post meme comes from Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and I do not want to break the chain, so I decided to follow the game. Moreover, I am eager to tag 6 more people to continue this meme!!

Lost in the Beach - Speaking German?

My parents use to go to the south of Portugal, to Algarve, during the summer for a two-week vacation on the beach. I was 2 years old and while I was playing in the sand with another fellow of my age, our huge castle of sand needed more water so I got up, took the bucket and went to the water. Then, after grabbing some water, in my way back to the “castle” I missed the track.. I was lost. My parents started to look for me immediately, each one to a different direction of the beach. They walked and walked but nothing. Each of them thought the other had found me and therefore they went back to the “castle”. Well, none of them found me. Several minutes later, a tall, strong and blond German (blond like me!!) had a kid on his shoulder, walking in the beach and waiting for someone to claim for the castle builder, I mean, me!!

My granddad is 93!!

Yes, and I am very proud of him. He goes to the vineyards and to the winery every day; still coordinating the employees; demanding and always active, my Avô Joao loves to drink a glass of Port after lunch (though the doctor - my mum - had forbade it to him some years ago due to a heart attack)!!

Farming my own vegetable garden

I’ve always been very close to the nature and to the land. One day, when I was 14 years old, I visited the vegetable garden of one of our employees, Sr. Joao. His garden was full of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, lettuces and much much more. I saw it so beautiful that when I got home I said to my parents that I wanted to grow a vegetable garden. I imagined it in the back of our house, where I used to play soccer with my friends. I asked one of the employees to come with a tractor to work the land, and Sr. Joao helped me to plant the vegetables and taught me how to irrigate them correctly. Well, very busy but wonderful time. Ah, how did I get revenues to compensate the initial investment (tractor, Sr. Joao’s work, seeds, water pump, etc)? I made an agreement with my mum and she would buy me all the vegetables she needd for the kitchen!! And at the end of the campaign I had some more money in my pocket!

Wine & Finance

I do not know if wine and finance combine; do winemakers get good returns for their investments? And do investors know to differentiate good and bad wine? Well, I love wine and I love finance. I started my career in Asset Management and then Private Banking and I loved it. What you probably do not know is that i was 13 when I first invested my money in the equities. At that time I had to go to a bank desk to give the buy and sell orders.

Soccer with broken foot

I love to play soccer and I am unconditional fan of FC Porto. During three years I played as a goal-keeper in the young team of my village. Before that, I used to play in a square, in front of my grandparents house, with all my colleagues from school. One day, when I was playing with my cousins and sister, I broke my left foot. As expected, my mama forbade me to play soccer. But one day I couldn’t resit it and after school I joined my team!! I do not remember if my team won but I think my mum does not know about this!!!

I love Francesinha

Francesinha is a typical dish from Porto. It is made with pan loaf, cheese, meet, sausage, ham and at the top a delicious sauce, almost secret! I eat it every single time I visit Porto! And to find the best places I ask my friend Jose Luis, he always guides me!

Who will I tag:

Blog de Laranja - André Ribeirinho, who runs this blog, is also co founder of adegga, a social wine discover. As an entrepreneur by himself he must have some nice stories worth to know.

For the love of Port - In a blog of a Port wine producer we must tag someone who loves Port as much as we do. I would love to hear from one of the leading Port Wine authorities, Roy Hersh.

The Wine Sleuth - Denise Medrano, an American wine lover living in London, told me she loved Warre’s Optima 10 Years Old Tawny, a Port from the Symington family. Lets hear more from her!

Copo de 3 - I have recently met Joao Pedro in a wine tasting. But we almost had no time to talk. It is time to hear some more from him!

Wine Conversation - This active and energetic blogger, fan of Rioja wines and always trying to promote the wine, is someone I would like to know much better. Do you want to start Robert McIntosh?

Wijnkronieken - Is a Dutch wine blog ran by Mariëlla and Nico. They use to write in Dutch so I have to use a translator program to read their posts. I hope this time they wright in English!!

Until my next post,

Oscar Quevedo

Highlights From The Porto & Douro Wine Show

During this weekend, between 22nd and 23rd of November, Quevedo has been attending to the Porto & Douro Wine Show, in Lisbon, Portugal. The event is full of small and medium producers of Port and Douro wine. However, I must confess I was expecting some more sounding names. But they preferred to stay at home. Maybe they fell they do not need to come and they do not need this event.

Other thing that surprised me was the low number of Port producers. Now it seems everybody in Douro make table wine and just very few make Port. Nobody wants to start making Port at this time.

During the Saturday we received the visit of some wine lovers with presence in internet: Francisco Brito from FB Port Wine Blog, Ema and Nuno from Magna Casta, Andrea from Catavino and André Ribeirinho and Emidio from Adegga. On Sunday we received the visit of João Pedro Carvalho from Copo de 3, Pingus Vinicus from Pingas no Copo and Rui from Vinho a Copo.

At the same time of the wine tasting there are also a gourmet food tasting where some of the most prestigious restaurants from Lisbon, such as Eleven, Terreiro do Paço and Quinta dos Frades show their new food combinations; a couple of big pasta producers present their new pizzas and new breads. So it is not just about drinking wine is also to eat some good food!! Interesting, no?!?

During the show took place a very interesting Port Wine tasting to compare aged tawnies with Colheitas of the same age, this is: comparing 10 Years Tawny with Colheita 1998; 20 Years Tawny with Colheita 1988; until the 40 Years Tawny and Colheita 1968. Engº Bento Amaral, Head of the Tasting Chamber of the Douro and Port Wine Institute, magisterially led this tasting.

We enjoyed and also met new people!

Oscar Quevedo

Quevedo in Porto & Douro Wine Show

This week Quevedo is heading south, but just a little bit, to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Between the 22nd and the 23rd of November, this is, from Saturday to Sunday, will take place in Convento do Beato the Porto and Douro Wine Show. This event is being co-promote by the Douro and Port Wine Institute and by Essência do Vinho.

I think this will be a great opportunity to meet again with the wine lovers from Lisbon, to meet some wine bloggers, mainly Portuguese and definitively, to taste and evaluate the most recent launches from Douro wineries!

So if you are reading this and you have not yet your week-end program complete, please come to Convento do Beato to meet Quevedo and to taste our and other wines from Douro. It is a very good opportunity and you must participate.

We will come with some news during the event.

Hope to see you there!

Oscar Quevedo

Port Wine - Humans Best Friend?

Before I started drinking Port Wine, I associated it with a wine for special occasions. Back then, when I couldn’t even distinguish a Tawny from a White, I thought that drinking a Port required a group of moustache-cigar-pipe elders and an important decision to make.

Now, a few months after I dived in Port (and I have positively dived in it, believe me), I started seeing and drinking it as a part of my life, drinking it before dinner, on the rocks, or with peanuts, on a Saturday afternoon, or with some friends, in the evening, at the Galerias de Paris, the heart of Porto’s night life, where many friends prefer vodkas-orange and whiskys-cola.

I’ve just noticed how, for me, only Port is tasty by itself, but I believe that it may also do well in a cocktail. Good challenge, to find what goes well with Port: Miguel Esteves Cardoso suggested pineapple…one must try it out! If you taste it, let us know.

Back to the subject, with what does Port match, I heard of combinations with music and with food, and I believe that there are many more with landscapes, books, journeys and seasons of the year. With such amount and quality of pairings, I feel that they are only one: Port pairs with Life. Ours!

Pedro Pardinhas

Douro Red Wine Between The Top 10 Wines of 2008 for Wine Spectator

The top 10 wines in 2008 from the magazine Wine Spectator brought an excellent result for the Portuguese wines. The red Quinta do Crasto Reserva Old Vines 2005 ranks in #3 with 95 points from the magazine.

This is definitively an extraordinary prize for this dedicated family. But are also amazing news for the Portuguese wines, and mainly for the Douro wines, which year after year are more and more known and recognized by the world wine experts.

From Quevedo we would like to congratulate the winemaking team, which includes Manuel Lobo, Dominic Morris and Tomás Roquette and say thank you to put the name of Portugal in so recognized list!

Oscar Quevedo

Top 10 Wines:

1. Casa Lapostolle, Clos Apalta Colchagua Valley 2005, 96 points, Chile

2. Château Rauzan-Ségla, Margaux 2005, 97 points, France

3. Quinta do Crasto, Douro Reserva Old Vines 2005, 95 points, Portugal

4. Château Guiraud, Sauternes 2005, 97 points, France

5. Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, Châteauneuf-du-Pape La Crau 2005, 95 points, France

6. Pio Cesare, Barolo 2004, 94 points, Italy

7. Château Pontet-Canet, Pauillac 2005, 96 points, France

8. Château de Beaucastel, Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2005, 96 points, France

9. Mollydooker Shiraz McLaren Vale Carnival of Love 2007, 95 points, Australia

10. Seghesio, Zinfandel Sonoma County 2007, 93 points, California

The Farewell from Belgium, Next Year A Bloggers Dinner

After had spent the last days in Belgium doing some wine tasting, Quevedo is back home and is now time to focus on the Christmas season, the most important for the sales of Port Wine.

These days in Belgium were really fruitful; we had opportunity to provide our wine for a tasting but also to taste several wines. Some of these tasting notes can be found in Adegga. I could learn more about the strong and full-bodied Kaapzicht wines from South Africa, about the extraordinary flavor of the Daniel-Etienne Defaix wines from Chablis or the elegant Chateau La Fleur de Graves from Graves de Vayres, just mentioning some.

I must confess that this tasting would have been much better with the presence of some bloggers. Wine or food blogger of Brussels or even from all Belgium, next year we have to be more active, you have to come to this tasting, where you can find over 100 wines from 7 different countries. Well, indeed we could go further and we could organize a bloggers dinner on Saturday evening. Leave your comments and we will try to put this idea up!

Oscar Quevedo

Last days of Quevedo Port and Douro Wine Tasting in Belgium

These days Quevedo head up north in Brussels, Belgium, doing some wine tasting with our clients and with the clients of our clients. The tasting will end tomorrow, the November 11th. If you are close to Brussels and if you want to taste our Port Wine, our Douro Wine or even any other wine from the producers present at the tasting (see the list underneath), just email me and I can try to get an invitation for you.

As far as I hear from the client here in the tasting, French wines still having the majority share in the Belgium’s’ private cellars. Nevertheless, wines from Spain, like DO Cava, from South Africa and from Portugal are getting more and more demand from those who look for new experiences and new tasting.

We are offering for tasting two Douro wines (Vinho Cão 2002 and Quinta Vale D’Agodinho 2003) and five Port Wines (Porto Rita’s Tawny, Porto Quevedo White, 10 Years Old, LBV 2000 and Vintage 2005). While the Douro wine is almost always a surprise as people here did not ever had tasted a Portuguese not fortified wine, the Port Wine is easily a success. The Belgium love Port (Belgium is the fifth market in value and volume) and there are a lot of Port enthusiasts. They know the different categories of Port, some emblematic brands and they are aware of the good harvests. This makes me really happy. I feel that all the hard work we have during the year to get a good wine is then carefully evaluated and analyzed by people that love wine. And this passion for wine is the principle of a small and familiar winery such us Quevedo!

Óscar Quevedo

Wine producers also represented in the wine tasting:

France

Mr Vigier, Chateau Les Chaumes, Chateau Reve, Pomerol

Mr Jean Luc Alla, Chateau de St Pey Gran Cru St Emilion

Mr Yves Glottin, Chateau Goudichaud, Chateau La Fleur des Graves, Graves de Vayres

Mr Francois de Coninck, Chateau Junayme, Chateau Canon, Fronsac

Mr Henri Brut, Clocher Notre Dame de Marceille, Clocher de Rouffiac, Limoux

Mr Gilles Bousquet, Domaine St Antoine, Minervois

Mlle Pedrol, Chateau Les Pins Cotes de Roussillon, Rivesaltes, Cotes de Roussillon

Mr Jerome Jelonch, Le Faite de St Mont, Plaimont

Domaine Edmond Rentz, Alsace

Domaine du Vieux Chateau, Daniel-Etienne Defaix, Chablis

Other countries

Ms Yngvild Steytler, Kaapzicht, Steytler, Stellenbosch, South Africa

Mr Erik Scheerlinck, Tsinandali, Saparavi Marani, Mukuzani from Georgia, Tamaioasa from Romania, Enira from Bulgaria

Mr Pedro Azcunaga, Azcunaga, Mont Michel, Navarra and Cava, Spain

Quevedo in Belgium

These days we are traveling in Belgium to do some wine tasting with our clients. Once a year, one of our clients, Roger & Luc De Smedt, a distributor located in Brussels, invites his clients for a wine tasting in a restaurant or a wine shop with the producers he represent and then finally at his shop.

We are here for four days, from Saturday November 8th to Tuesday, November 11th. Today we are in the Home & Passion restaurant, a French traditional cuisine restaurant, where the Italian Chef Pino, from Sicilia, leads the kitchen. We were four producers: Alain Vigier from Bordeaux, France, Daniel-Etienne Defaix from Chablis France, Kaapzicht from Stellenbosch, South Africa and us, Quevedo from Douro, Portugal.

At around 7pm we had dinner at the Home & Passion and after we went to a decoration shop also for showing our wines to the people that were visiting the shop and buying decoration stuff for Christmas.

And as there is no Christmas without Port Wine, 7 weeks before Christmas is probably the right moment to think about which Port to choose. And why the tasting at the decoration shop? Well, a bottle could also be seen as a decoration piece while the wine is in its ageing process!! Or maybe the right reason is that Luc is friend of the decoration shop owner!

It has been a fruitfulness experience and I hope to come back to you once again during these days.

Óscar Quevedo

What I Use To Read In Internet About Wines

Internet is such a huge ocean that you can easily get lost. And even if you just want to look for wine related information you will have so many contents and you hardly know which site to choose. So I thought I could share with you what I use to read when I want to get some information about wine.  I will try to keep a periodic update on this subject.

Starting for Portuguese media, I use to go to Revista Blue Wine to keep me updated about the news of the wine sector in Portugal. Revista Blue Wine is also monthly hard cover magazine you kind find in the main news-stands.

As blogging from a winery is something really new in Portugal, started by Cortes de Cima during the first half of 2008, and followed by us in July, I always want to know what our colleagues and friends are doing. And they always have some fun stories and news to share. Visit them here.

I could not finish this first post about what blogs I use to read without mention my main source of information. Catavino or if you prefer Ryan and Gabriella Opaz are the definitive bloggers writing about Portuguese and Spanish wines. Beside their deep knowledge about Iberian wines and food, they are also two nice Americans. Visit them!

I will come back soon with some news from Belgium.

Oscar Quevedo

Harvest is Finally Over in The Quevedo Estates

We can finally say that we have finished our harvest. Yesterday we made the last Port of the season from the last grapes that were still fermenting, 10 days after we had finished to pick-up grapes. As we use to say in the Douro: up to the wash of the boxes is vintage!

This year the harvest started on the 8th of September, which was not really early when compared with last years’ dates. But as this year the ripening was quite irregular, indeed an atypical year, we decided to start the harvest with lower sugar content. As we had posted at that time, we started in Douro Superior - Quinta das Olgas with Bé of between 12,6º and 13,4º. Quinta da Alegria finished a couple of days after, on the 13th of September and 3 days later we started to harvest in Quinta Vale D’Agodinho. At that time the Bé of this vineyard was similar to those of the previous vineyards.

After we had finished the harvest in Quinta Vale D’Agodinho we stopped for 10 days. We restarted on October 6th in the vineyards located at around 620 meters above the sea level, close to S. João da Pesqueira. Also these vineyards suffered from the low temperatures of the Summer, which did not allow very high sugar concentration, Grapes arrived at the winery with around Bé of 12,0º and 12,5º. Well, the good part is that we got wines with very fruity flavours, low pH and high total acidity. In spite of all ripening difficulties, the color obtained was quite good.

We had decided to harvest the Quinta da Trovisca after all our vineyard have been harvested. This vineyard is located at around 550 meters above the sea level and as a classification of B by the IVDP. Leaving it to the end of the harvest, this is mid October is a quite risky decision because an abundant rain previous to the harvest could had harmed the grapes. In Quinta da Trovisca we have all the grapes divided by varietal (which is not traditional in Douro) - touriga nacional, touriga franca, tinta roriz and sousão. And it came up to be a good decision to leave it to mid October. We got a very good color and an unique flavour, not yet smelt during all this vintage.

Thus, I can say it was a log harvest but it was not a worn out vintage. The breaks in the reception of grapes left us some time to work on other stuff. And we can say that the quality was good. However we have to wait for the evolution of the wines to figure out if they turn up excellent.

Now is time to reflect, to reorganize and come back to the routine. The Christmas is coming and as the tradition says, in the Christmas Eve we must all have a bottle of Port to celebrate the birth of Jesus. It is time to send our bottles to those who want to celebrate with Quevedo!

Come back soon,

Claúdia Quevedo

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