When I first moved in and I still had my wits, I decided that my time would be best spent building rather than winemaking. I gave away some four oak barrels, about 100 bottles and a bunch of other stuff to make some space for my hardware.

Two years on, and somewhat less sane and sensible, I have decided to give this wine caper a go.

At the end of the vindima I picked my own grapes. I have two varieties at my place. One is the very typical ‘morangueiro’ also known as ‘vinho americano’ named after the hybrid imported from North America to combat the Phylloxera plague which decimated European vines in the late 19th century.

The hybrid grape is known as isabella, whose parents are vitis labrusca (whose strong strawberry, morango, scent lends itself to the Portuguese name) and the native European grape vitis vinifera. Unfortunately it looks like isabella might have been the actual carrier of the nymph-fly Phylloxera to Europe from the Americas in the first place, where the native American grapes were immune. Subsequent to the plague, the vinho americano was employed as a disease resistant and hardy variety to be used as a rootstock. In poor and needy early 20th century Portugal, many farmers preferred to cultivate isabella without grafting or restoring the native varieties. In viticulture, not only was it recognised that the grape produced very poor quality wine but the hybrid grapes were considered an aberration on the European wine industry, and a ban was put on the commercialisation of this variety. Hence, you won’t find morangueiro in a bottle. More recently, morangueiro was a suspected cause of white matter lesions in the brain, i.e. brain damage, but the experts now say that it’s falling on your head after drinking morangueiro that’s the culprit. Still, “it would explain a few things” as my brother-in-law  put it.

my grapes: tinta on left. morangueiro on right

Farmers today continue to grow isabella /morangueiro/vinho americano, especially in the Azores Islands where all European grapes had died. It’s the predominate backyard grape in this region. It’s prolific and hardy and some people have even become fans of the taste.

My other grape variety they call “tinta”. This could be one of a number of grapes native to Portugal: tinta amarela, tinta barroca, tinta caiada, tinta francisca, tinta miuda, or tinta negra mole. Or it could be that the neighbours don’t know what it is and it’s always just been called ‘red’. Or it could be mean they think it tastes like paint…

OK, less conversation, more action: I picked my grapes, cleaned them from the stem, gave them a wash and put them in two big buckets. I still own a grape masher, but it’s an enormously weighty contraption and I thought it wouldn’t be worth getting it out for only about 80 litres of grapes. Anyway, as foot mashing is traditional somewhere in Portugal I thought I’d give it a whirl. Set up the camera, washed the feet and jumped in.

And immediately fell on my arse, on concrete, causing a bruise as big as a t-bone steak. It’s slippery in a bucket of grapes. DER.

That night, hot feet woke me up, but I didn’t think too much of it. The following night, after another round of foot mashing, my burning, itching feet woke me up again. Not just itchy, I mean itchy bitchy itchy. I had to get up and give them a cold bath and then balm them gently with ointment until they calmed down.

Obviously that put a stop to any more foot-grape shenanigans. As the week continued my feet just got itchier and so shredded up and gory that I looked like I had leprosy.

the moment before falling, expertly captured

I complained to the neighbours. They said of course, idiot tourist, you see us foot mashing? No. DER.

I continued a once-daily mashing of the pomace with, logically, a potato masher. This process is meant to stimulate the fermenting of the grapes, but already I could see that there wasn’t much happening with the ‘tinta’ batch. No bubbles, not much smell. At this point someone more experienced might have added sugar or yeast to get it moving along, but my neighbours use no additives at all, so why would I?

After a week the neighbours told me I had to listen to the wine ingasso (pomace) and if it was quiet, I should drain it off. Indeed, as the wine said nothing, I drained it off, putting one batch in a brand new plastic jerrycan and the other batch into 5L plastic bottles. As I was draining the last of it through a pillowcase, Tia Maria suddenly appeared shaking her head disappointedly. She used some peasant viticulture terms that lay just outside my vocabulary, but I got the gist. It wasn’t looking good.

The method I was using was to follow what the neighbours do, but I was also bearing in mind advice from wine forums where the people are (perhaps) more concerned with the flavour of their labour. I should have done precisely what the neighbours do, but the trouble is, the traditional method is only focussed on saving the crop from souring. I was at crossed purposes, hedging my bets between an amish-like purity and the web-wino’s techno-intelligence.

At this point nothing was going to save this year’s “vintage”. The tinta had never tasted like wine, and was now swinging towards vinegar. The morangueiro at least had some alcoholic quality to it, but I wouldn’t say it was drinkable, exactly.

The one saving grace was that I also made 30 litres of agua pé from the must of the morangueiro. Agua pé is a drink traditionally given to the workers, to children and to the chestnut-eating people on St Martin’s day. It’s water that has been drained through the grape must, with a bucket of sugar added. It is mildly alcoholic, but is basically a nasty cordial… and that’s alright by me.

And there is a final consolation: if your wine turns out complete crap, you can still distill it to make aguardente. Morangueiro makes great aguardente… but for that story you’ll have to read part two…

No sooner had my flesh eating visitors departed than the neighbours had roped me in to help with the grapes. Actually I volunteered in the name of PR and buying protection from the village mafia who have it in for me again because of the dog.

Apparently (and I would like emphasise the speculative flavour of the word apparently) while my guests and I were casually enjoying a top class breakfast, little darling-wookie-dog went and bit one of the sheep. Funny really because I seem to recall him sitting with us and begging for choriço and presunto… and there are 6 other unleashed dogs in the village, with teeth. One of the neighbours and I have decided it was probably little ‘pulga’ (flea), the remaining puppy, who did the job… I’m sure with further DNA testing and forensic processing my precious will be cleared of wrong doing.

Anyway, back to the grapes. It’s not hard work, and there’s no great rush on, but by the end of the day one is knackered nonetheless, and extremely grateful to the flesh-eater who left a quarter bottle of serious scotch whisky behind. I quite enjoy the work, and I think my neighbours do too. Friends and family drop over to pitch in with the work and eat the food, and there’s a bit of a party atmosphere. They make the work a bit of fun – On day one there was singing, the highlight being a 70 yr old husband and wife love duet.

Day two was mostly farting, but there was a dirty joke which had the old girls weeping with laughter. On day three, we’ve had a great deal of discussion about her (that’s me): my unorthodox picking technique which involves ascending the dodgy vine pergola (we were short of ladders), my dog situation and how the 10m long loose leash method is not fooling anyone, and how cool my board shorts are (thanks to australian surfer  brother nick). And there was a whole lot more farting, for which my dog got the blame.

Today we achieved a record 1500 kilos of grapes (the other two days we could only manage about 500-750) and now Tia Maria’s vat is full of squashed fermenting grapes, stems and bits of dirt. As I’m trying to learn a bit before I do my own, I’ll pass on the following notes:

• The predominant grape here is Morangeira, there’s a bluer grape they call Tinta and there are white grapes they call Branco. (Imaginative names (not) and are probably in village language not real portuguese). They mix everything in together.
• They don’t wash the grapes and they don’t even remove the bigger stems, let alone the little ones. Some dividing of the white grapes happened because they are being picked quite late and a lot were either eaten by bees or rotten already.
• Although foot mashing is still widely practised in Portugal as a method for making must (I was pretty keen to zip home and put on a skirt until I saw the size and depth of the vat, and realised it was more a wetsuit and snorkel situation) and they do say it lends a certain flavour to the wine, (ahem). Tia Maria has gone slightly modern and is using an electrically-powered crusher that looks like an old-fashioned laundry squeezer.
• The musty grapes will ferment for 3 more days (but six days since the first batch went in). They then listen to hear if the fermenting has gone quiet (yes, that’s what they said). If it has then the wine will be drained from the bottom of the tank into stainless steel vats (although she has some oak barrels that she got from me that she might use this year, she says). Then they’ll test it after a month but it’s meant to wait for 3 months…they’ll try not to start drinking it, but then again, there’s a lot to get through, so why wait?

I’ve asked about chemicals, I’ve asked about yeast, I’ve asked about sugar. No to all. It’s just 100% dirty grape juice. (I must say that it tastes a lot like dirty grape juice too, but it’s free and in Portugal wine is just something you drink, not eulogise, so who’s complaining?) ‘Organic’ one of the smarter neighbours said with a wink, because no one has the time, energy or money for spraying.

After the wine has been drained off, the pomace will be used to make aguardente (portuguese grappa) in a process of heating and distilling.

Then the grandchild-who-inherits-everything will be given the nasty task of removing 500 kilos of filthy mush from the 2 metre high tank, (this I would like to see) whereupon it will be dumped in the street and will flow like the rivers of blood in the streets of mafia-ruled Sicily…