Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [63]
Yeast is seldom added, because the ambient yeasts from the outsides of the skins of the grapes themselves will begin the fermentation by working on the sugar. By morning, the skins will have floated to the surface, and as fermentation progresses, a “cap” or crust will form. Planks are laid across the lagar, and men with special poles called macacos will push the cap below the surface until the desired color and sugar levels are reached. The juice is then run off the lagar into a vat that is already one-fifth full of aguardente, whose alcohol content is normally about 77 percent. When the two are mixed together, the yeasts are killed and the fermentation stopped. The maturing process then begins.
The use of feet rather than crushing machines results in port of a much higher quality, because, as noted above, feet ensure a higher extraction of the color, tannins, and flavor compounds without the danger of crushing the pips. The problem is that it is a very labor-intensive process. During the 1970s, the local youth began to leave the area: many of the young men were sent to fight Portugal’s colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola, and both sexes went to the cities, where both job opportunities with much higher pay and excitement were in much greater supply than in the villages of the Douro. As a consequence, in the 1990s, many of the port producers began to bring in machines to supply the labor that humans were increasingly less willing to provide. Only the truly premium ports are now the result of feet.
Why did native American wine grapes make such bad wine?
WHEN THE FIRST colonists came to eastern North America in the early seventeenth century, they found masses of grapevines crawling up trees, snaking along the ground, and forming thick natural hedges. Grapevines meant wine, and wine meant that the colonists would not have to drink water, a liquid well known to cause illness and even death. In England, there was beer and ale, but in order to plant barley and hops, you needed what was then unavailable: a strong plow and oxen to pull it. Therefore, wine it would be. The first Englishmen emigrated to Virginia in 1607, but they did not seriously attempt to make wine in any quantity for some years, in spite of the urgings of the London shareholders in the enterprise, who were keen that wine should be made and exported from America. They wanted to make money from their investment in the colony, which, they thought, provided the right conditions for growing wine grapes. Furthermore, if the English wanted wine, they had to import it, and it was preferable that this money be kept within the empire, rather than going to those enemies of England who made wine. The Virginians sent a shipment of wine to London in 1622, but it spoiled en route and was unsaleable, and that ended that venture. In Massachusetts, the first Puritans emigrated in 1630, and tried to make wine during their first year. The result was so dire that they petitioned London to send out some French wine-makers to show them how to do it. But if their winemaking was at fault, even more so were the grapes.
For winemaking, the best species is Vitis vinifera, which today is used for 99 percent of all of the wine consumed in the world. However, V. vinifera was not native to eastern North America, and when attempts were made in the eighteenth century to import cuttings and grow it in the colonies, the vines were destroyed by the significant variations in climate of the northeastern seaboard or by diseases such as phylloxera, to which native American varieties were largely immune. The most important native grapes were Vitis labrusca, V. riparia, and V. rupestris. V. riparia has often provided the rootstock on which varieties