Dirk Niepoort had no formal enology training. Instead, he'd been trained by his father, Rolf, and his friends to taste, to select wines for the cellar, and eventually to sell them. He'd grown up wandering throught the Niepoort cellars, through cobwebbed shelves of hand-blown garrafeiras, bottles of translucent, golden and amber Ports.
Garrafeira, or bottle-aged Port, is just one rarity that Niepoort has kept alive, off in a small corner of their small, essentially elite Port business. It's like entering a library of rare old books, except the volumes are luscious and delicious. The Niepoort family had been collecting them for over a century, history lessons for a student in Port.
Barely thirty, Dirk Niepoort convinced his father to buy vineyard land, two neighboring quintas, Napoles and Carril, on the Tedo River west of Pinhão. The old vines on the properties would help build a base for Niepoort's vintage releases, a part of the business the younger Niepoort was determined to build. He loved the rich, round power of classic Cima Corgo vintage Ports. And he was fascinated by the possibility of making table wines from these old, mixed plantings. He collected a few rows of barrels for the small cellar at Napoles, and began filling them with the juice from his own vines and other lots he'd happen across. One barrel, a blend of local white grapes, tasted like a rich white Burgundy. Another was filled with moscatel de Faváois, from a cartload of grapes destined for the coop that he just happened to pass on the road, stop, taste, and purchase. And the wine was stunning.
Now, barely forty, Dirk Niepoort has a full table wiine business to complement Niepoort's traditional Port. He's hired Jorge Borges, whose family owns the Quinta do Fojo, as his winemaker, and he's producing
›Redoma‹ at Napoles, purchasing old-vine grapes from north-facing vineyards. He makes the more limited
›Batuta‹ from similarly old vines at Quinta do Carril. The ›'99 Batuta‹ is pure Niepoort: limited quantity, exceptional quality, indelible character from old vines (it's a mixed planting of 60 to 70-year-old vines, mainly
tinta amarela,
touriga francesa and
tinta roriz). Those vines seem to draw out the
schist of the soil even as they concentrate the warmth of the sun into their grapes which Niepoort and Borges have then managed to preserve in this wine, virtually alive with power in the glass.
And Niepoort now has a more significant stake in the vintage Port business as well. While there have always been great Niepoort vintages, they were rare. But in '94 and '97. Niepoort came in at the top of these great years. And in the latest release, with the secondary declaration of the
›'99 Secundum‹ as well as the '99 bottled from Quinta do Passadouro in the Pinhão Valley, Niepoort produced two of the best wines of the vintage. Whether you choose the vast, purple-black Passadouro with its compressed floral fruit or the ›Secundum‹, for its contrasts of meaty blackness and brighter red berry complexities, either makes a strong argument for adding '99s to your cellar. „For Port,” Niepoort explains, „we don't destern, all of its is made in
lagars, aged in pipes and bottled quite late.” He believes this traditional style of winemaking, from the fruit of old-vine mixed plantings, is critical to the volume, quality and character of the
tannin in the finished Port: „A wine with tannin will be rich and concentrated, and it will age; but the tannins don't need to be aggressive. Our Port may be the most tannic, but you don't feel the tannins.”
These are the new Niepoort wines. But great as they may be, they haven't eclipsed the family's classic
tawnies. Several years ago, after lunch at Passadouro, Niepoort opened a 30-year-old tawny bottled in 1986. He was explaining to me that the best tawnies need bottle age, and there was no more proof necessary than this wine. With the sun on the white steps outside, the beautifully balanced flavors of the Niepoort Tawny on the palate, it was the bliss of the Douro. The wine was balanced, lovely, compelling: Everything you could hope a wine would be.
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