Winemaking

Quinta dos Malvedos has a boutique winery with three modern treading lagares. Originally built in 1890, the winery is exclusively dedicated to producing Graham’s ports.

Installed in 2000, our modern lagares are designed to replicate the heat and gentle treading action of human feet. During the harvest, arriving grapes are sorted by hand before being gently de-stemmed and transferred to one of the lagares.

Once fermentation has taken place and the wines have been fortified, they are transferred to the lodge below and housed in tonéis (large barrels) over the winter, before being taken to the Graham’s Lodge in Gaia.

Blending

Led by our Master Blender, Charles Symington, our team of tasters and blenders are responsible for deciding how to age our wines each year and carefully monitor the ongoing development of wines originally chosen for ageing by their predecessors decades earlier.

Charles personally tastes and evaluates each of the wines ageing in the Graham’s Lodge, deciding which wines to blend and at what age. There is no scientific analysis for this work, only the combined skill and instinct of experienced winemakers and tasters.

Ageing

All our wines are aged in the Graham’s 1890 Lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia as it benefits from a cooler maritime climate. A port’s character is largely determined by the way it has been aged, and port styles can be divided into those aged in bottle and those in seasoned wood – whether small oak casks or large vats.

Vintage Ports spend only about 18 months in wooden vats. Once bottled, they have no further contact with air so the colour, structure, complexity, and character of the wine changes slowly with time.

Tawny ports are aged in seasoned oak casks to ensure good contact with oxygen. This causes the colour to change more rapidly: from the original deep purple-red to lovely tawny shades. A tawny’s colour and taste continue to develop over the years spent in cask.

Cooperage

Graham’s is one of the few remaining port houses to employ its own team of coopers. Their expertise in the ancient art of cooperage is fundamental to port winemaking, and especially for wines that spend decades ageing in the lodge.

Led by Master Cooper Snr. Alberto, our coopers are responsible for the maintenance of each vat and cask throughout the lodge. At any one time, the lodge will have around 3,500 casks, holding several million litres of wine. As each cask is typically 75-100 years old, they require constant and careful attention.