Port and the Creation of Hundred Acre - Fortification

I had collected vintage Port for years when I first started thinking about making my own from a select pass from Hundred Acre's Kayli Morgan vineyard in Napa Valley.

This vineyard is planted to 100% Cabernet Sauvignon and as such would be very different from the fortified wines of the Douro of Portugal. But that was not really enough for me as most of the vintage Port made now and for the last 100 years were being fortified...

Side Note: Port is created by taking wine that is fermenting and still sweet and altering it by the addition of alcohol thus stopping fermentation due to the yeast dying from too high levels of alcohol 19-21% and therefore the wine does not finish fermenting and is sweet and stronger than a normal dry red wine.

...using various high alcohol substances such as brandy or I am sure in many cases grape based vodka or some other nasty grape distillate barely drinkable I am sure. So this brought me to the question of how important is this fortifying agent in the making of the Port? The only way to figure that out was to learn more about brandy.

So I went on a search tasting all the greatest brandy I could lay my hands on and then going through the process of understanding distillation back to Arab Alchemists in the 7 and 8th century. But the real meat came from my friends Marko and Miles (13th generation Master Distiller and his father a 12th generation Master Distiller) who walked me through the true art of distilling.

They were both very careful not to disclose their most guarded secrets but they opened my eyes to a number of things. The first was the difference between various types of stills, column stills versus Alembic Pot Stills and many other types, the importance of the metal they are made from, the importance of the size of the pot, the art of tasting and watching the distillate as it emerged from the still, the art of cutting the good from the bad etc etc it really is an amazing art and in the end the difference between something made in their hands and something made in a more production oriented facility was like wine in a bag versus a great single vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon made by me.

I was stunned. How the hell could anyone make truly amazing Port unless they started with two incredible quality ingredients and those had to be the wine and the fortification agent aka in my case the brandy. So it became clear for me why the Ports from Portugal in many cases needed to be bottle aged for so long as they were probably using wine that would not rate to well in my books for drinking and their brandy or whatever they were using was probably pretty rough material that in combination with the wine would take a long time to integrate into a cohesive whole.

I wondered if I used Hundred Acre wine and enlisted Marko and Miles to distill my very own brandy in their perfectionist way whether this would give me a Port that would be incredible from the beginning? That is to say the Port would not require a decade of aging in order to be phenomenol.

My first step was to determine with Miles and Marko what was the optimal volume of wine to distill and at the same time they advised me to what point the wine should be fermented and at what level the fruit ripened to in order to get the proper chemical composition for distilling to optimal aromatics and flavor.

Then I went in search of a vineyard because there was no way I was going to double distill the wine from the Hundred Acre vineyards as I would lose all my wine for brandy production and bankruptcy would soon follow. So I went in search of a fruit source in Napa Valley for the brandy production.

After a few months of searching, I finally found a vineyard in Rutherford that had the right soils and would produce fruit that rightfully should be going into a good bottle of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. Alas in my enthusiasm I bought the whole vineyards production and went about fermenting the wine exactly as I would for Hundred Acre keeping in mind the lessons from Marko and Miles. After fermenting the wine it was moved to the still house where their traditional french made Alembic Pot still resides and Marko went about double distilling the wine into brandy using seven fractal distillation with me at his side to keep the beer cold.

Side Note: Seven Fractal distillation is where a cut is taken from the first distillation known as the heart which is the middle third with the top and bottom third being the nasty heads and tails, which are thrown out out or sold off to big production distilleries. The heart or center 1/3 is the redistilled and 1/4 of that is retained as the heart of the hearts. The result is a 10:1 reduction in other words 2,000 cases of red wine from Rutherford which should have been an $80 bottle or $1,920,000 turned into 200 cases of 164 proof pure double distilled brandy.

So, what we are then left to do is take the the wonderfully pure Hundred Acre brandy and age it in used Hundred Acre barrels for years and years where it will pick up the color of the barrels, mellow and just become a golden elixir of the Gods. Naturally during the process the brandy will evaporate through the wood and we will lose another 15% so now after five or six years the brandy is not 200 cases more like 170 and roughly worth a ton of money per bottle. Now I had the brandy and needed to figure out how I was going to make my Port, but wait while I was making Brandy the EU pulled a very nasty little trick and the US government bureaucratic morons let them get away with it...

Side Note: The EU decided that the term Port was the exclusive property of the Douro Valley in Portugal. The fact that Port got its name from the sea side town of Porto in the late 17th century and the Douro appellation was established in 1756 as the third oldest appellation in the world is fine, however it is a process in my opinion and to protect the name as the French have tried by claiming they invented Red Wine (fortunately the EU did not try that one) is a little ludicrous. Here's where it gets better still the US government decided they would follow the EU's position on this and enforce it on us winemakers and winery owners!! Now if you produced a Port in America prior to the EU's position you are grandfathered and still can call your wine Port. Anything produced after a certain date cannot be called Port. Therefore TTB will not approve your label and and you cannot sell wine without an approved label. So now I was making a Port I could not call Port...nice!!

Let's talk about the name problem for a second and what the hell was I going to do now. I decided to name the Hundred Acre "Port" something that represented what it truly was and that is a single vineyard pure Cabernet Sauvignon wine combined or rather fortified by a double distilled pure single vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon brandy. As far as I know there are other Cab Ports but none that are single vineyard in both wine and brandy and both pure Cabernet Sauvignon.

So I decided to name it FORTIFICATION and etch the entire bottle rather than use a regular label. On the back my signature is etched below my words for the EU. I put "EU GFY" on the the bottle to note EU Good For You...to indicate my displeasure with their stupid rules.

Now that I had my stock of brandy it was time to make some Port.

Side Note: Over the years I have distilled more brandy and in fact Marko and I are now planning on building a small Alembic Pot still on one of the Hundred Acre vineyard sites. More on that later...

So with the brandy aging I needed to decide on my method of making my port.

Normally, the wine is fermented to a certain point where 1/3 to 1/2 of all the sugar is fermented and then the wine is pulled off the skins and fortified, fermentation stops and the port is then barreled down for aging.

All I can tell you is that is not the way I make Fortification. What I have learned is that the wine must be the very best and the brandy must be properly aged and distilled in order to produce something with fully integrated flavors but also with extremely complex aromatics. Naturally, I believe we have an advantage here in America as the creation of brandy here is not restricted to certain grape varietals as in France. I believe that being able to marry the aromatics of Cabernet Sauvignon brandy with Cabernet Sauvignon makes a great deal of sense in the final creation, although I am not opposed to using Pinot Noir brandy as well as the aromatics are again beautiful and could add another dimension/layering to the final port.

Hope you enjoyed my "brief" discussion on Port and the creation of Hundred Acre - FORTIFICATION