You can make aguardente from sugar cane, fruit, potatoes, grains and even honey. In that case we would call it rum (sugar cane), vodka (sometimes potatoes), whisky (grains), or gin (juniper berries). A wide variety of herbs and spices are often added as flavourings, and the distilled spirit may be aged in wood which alters its colour and flavour, but essentially all spirits start life in the same way. In my region aguardente is specifically made from the crushed grapes and juice of the morangueiro vine.

If you are lucky, you’ve inherited or bought a house with a still, or alambique in Portuguese. If I’ve learnt something from the wine making experience, if you have an old set-up, then you’ve got the technology; keep it. And use it! My neighbour’s alambique is more than 100 years old which indicates it’s been thoroughly tried and tested and it still works. My neighbour’s son has heard stories from his grandfather about his grandfather using this very still. He was the master. But it could have gone much further back than that. Nobody knows.

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The still is made up of 4 parts. First below, the fireplace at floor level, and above it the copper still. From the top of the still, a copper pipe descends through a cooling bath, and out the other side carrying the condensation of the heated wine, into a bottle. This clear liquid has about 20-25% alcohol and can be drunk now ‘raw’ or aged either in bottles or in oak barrels. As it ages, the spirit gradually changes from clear to honey-brown, and its flavour and alcohol content will develop. Some aguardentes have an alcoholic potency of 60 or 70%.

Getting to that is a very simple process. Pick your grapes. Squash them and leave to to ferment for a week. Pour off some of the wine.

Clean out your still by lighting the fire and running vinegar & water solution through the system. Then you gather the leaves of a shrub called carquejo and line the bottom of the still with it – this is to stop the wine/grapes from burning the bottom of the copper pot.

Next, in his 80 litre still, my neighbour first puts in 10 litres of wine, or the first juice from the pressed grapes. Then 60 litres of pomace and then 10 more litres of wine.

Then he sits and watches it until the condensation starts trickling out the spout, at that point it’s important to watch the level of the fire, not to raise it, but not to let the temperature drop so that the distilling is interrupted. During this period many neighbours will drop by for a chinwag, to share a roasted sausage or chestnut and sample a drop of the goodstuff. It will take all weekend to make about 8 litres of aguardente. And then it will take all year to drink it.

The preferred Portuguese way to drink aguardente is to add it to an espresso. In some areas it’s traditional for breakfast, which makes me wonder what they’ll have for lunch. Throughout Portugal it’s a winter warmer, but me myself when I’m at home, I like it on crepes suzette.

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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…

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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…

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So please advise, horticulturists, what are these called in English?

This is the time of year in my village when this plant, all year round a painful and invasive nuisance, finally pays back. It’s luscious and intense fruit makes fantastic jam, and I love jam. The amoras season also marks the start of several months of picking, being followed by the grapes, then the olives, oranges and then finally in November it will rain figs. When the figs stop, the rain will start, and it wont stop raining until may.

I really like making jam, but I only recently discovered that other people like my jam too. It makes me especially happy when my jars of stuff are enjoyed by portuguese friends. Normally my giveaways are just too weird for them, but jam seems to fit in with a normal portuguese jam-freshcheese-biscuits afternoon snack or dessert. And I’m only too happy to find a new way to eat jam.

Amoras Jam

For 1 jar of jam, I use approximately;

1 jar fruit
1/2 jar white sugar
juice of half lemon
1/3 jar rosé wine

I like my jams a bit runny, full of chunky fruit and not too sweet. The wine gives the jam a bit more complexity and depth.

I boil it up ferociously until a mass of bubbles have collected high above the surface of the fruit – it looks like boiling toffee. It usually takes about half an hour and I could let it go for an hour, but no more. I don’t bother to skim or even test for setting, but I do wash and boil the jars, dry them, fill them warm and then boil them again.

Apart from having jam on toast (especially good on portuguese breads), I also eat it with plain yoghurt for dessert, pile it on ice cream and serve it with fresh cheese, portuguese style. It would also be unforgettable with pannacotta (similar to leite creme in portugal) or on a cheesecake. Or a pavlova! Oh meu amor!

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Visitors. Can’t stop them coming, can’t eat them. Filth-making, freeloading, floppers. Still, they do bring quality teas. And chocolate. And they teach the dog tricks. That’s good. And they build compost heaps. They make cups of tea. That’s good too. Oh, alright then. Visitors are ok. But they make you FAT. All those bolos de berlim I had to have! All those pasteis de nata!

Anyway, now that they’ve gone back to where they came from, I’m back to work on the house. OMG. It’s been months now, enough time for the trenches I’ve dug to have filled in again and grown weeds. Let’s see how my vertigo likes hard sweaty work…

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So I put the question out there to the experts – OOPS I mean expats. As non-Portuguese, I felt, expats have a home-country standard to compare to, and therefore an appreciation of the price-value of these wines, that a native might take for granted.

And as it turns out – (see expatsportugal.com) the expats are veritable connoisseurs of the 2 euro wine!

I took their recommendations to the supermarket and bought 10 of those available. The random selection broke down into regions like this:

Six from the Alentejo, two from the Dão, one from the Bairrada region and one from Setubal. The Alentejo is a hotter, drier region and the Dão is a cooler, wetter region. The Bairrada is slightly less wet and cool and Setubal is slightly less hot and dry. See Map.

As in France, wines are defined by region rather than grape variety, as each region has a profile of grapes specific to that region.

So that the judges would not be tempted to downgrade all the wines indiscriminately, I threw in a 2007 Marques de Borba, a very well respected drop from the Alentejo that retails for about 6 euros. Posh.

I presented the 11 wines to a carefully selected panel of portuguese friends, who instead of turning up their noses at the whole process as I expected, took to the project with sincerity and conscientiousness. We got quite pissed.

The wines were tested blind. Without labels, that is… I don’t mean blindfolds.

On with the results, which I’ve listed in tasting order, as I do think this had an influence on the results…

1. Encosta da Estrela 2005. Vila Nova de Tazem. Dão D.O.C.
This wine has a transparent chestnut colour and a sweet, fruity aroma. Lots of red fruit especially strawberries, quite acidy and young in flavour. Overall: Bom!
20.5/50

2. Dão Monastico 2007. Dão.
A strong magenta in colour, velvety and fruity in the mouth, but probably a bit too acidy. Maybe good with chocolate. Overall: Bonito! 25/50

3. Porta da Ravessa. Alentejo.
Same intense pinky colour of the last one. Big berries, but a bit rough and not very inspiring… 20.5/50

4. The wild card. Marques de Borba. 2007. Alentejo D.O.C.
Getting boring, nice smell but unimpressive. Overall: Rough! 21/50

5. Almocreve 2008. Alentejo.
Looks like red wine, tastes like red wine. Overall: Forgettable 20/50

6. Continente brand. 2007 Alentejo.
Strong ruby colour, very fruity smelly, young, lots of bang, pretty smooth. Overall: Punchy! 29/50

7. Terras del Rei. 2007. Alentejo.
Smells like dirt and poo, and tastes a bit of overripe red fruit and tomatoes. “Good cooking wine”, “good with bolognese or burgers”. Overall: Slug glug. 23/50

8. Terras do Xisto 2008. Roquevale, Alentejo.
A cheesy smell, a bit dirty, robust flavour, quite woody and a little acidy. Chewy. Bordering on complex. Overall: Agradavél! (nice) 25/50

9. Uvas Douradas 2007. Bairrada. WINNER!
Transparent with a rosy perfume. A young wine, lots of zing, kind of freshy and lighter than the others, not overpowering, very drinkable. Smooth and velvety. Overall: More! 33/50

10. Alandra. Esporão.
Perfect colour for lipstick. Nice smell, more mature, meaty, lots of flavour, busy, yummy! 31/50

11. JP Azeitão. Terras do Sado, Setubal.
Red, alcoholic, sweet berry wine. Rich, bitey and willing. Yes, quite sloshed. 28.5/50

Notice how the scores got higher as we went on? And the Bairrada wine has a completely distinct Baga grape, so it stood out from the others. But why did the expensive one not rate? Interesting!

Overall, the judges felt that none of the wines were truly terrible, but that only some compared better to the others. The standard was considered very good. The judges also commented that while they normally didn’t buy wines this cheap for quaffing, they couldn’t immediately claim that more expensive wines were actually any better. In fact, it’s not uncommon to be disappointed in a more expensive wine.

And that’s the bottom line: for two euros, disappointment isn’t really a factor.

To recap,

The Best:

Uvas Douradas 2007
Alandra
Continente brand Alentejo.

The Worst:

Almocreve 2008
Encosta de Estrela
Porta da Ravessa

And this is only a tiny sample of what’s available in Portugal in this price range. The quest to find a Truly Great Wine Under 2 Euros could go on, and I feel pretty confident that we can find a cheapie that can beat a 10 euro wine. And then, who knows, maybe a 20? A Grange Hermitage?

I wonder whether it’s possible in anywhere else in the world? A quick glance around the net and I think not… but at least people are testing the idea! Thanks winestar… anyone else game to try?

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