Bucelas Revived

Even among lovers of Portuguese wine, the name Bucelas is largely unknown.  It’s a DOC, the Portuguese equivalent of the French ‘Appellation Contrôlée’, from vineyards just to the north of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, but, until The Wine Society put an example on their list recently to mark their 150 years of trading, I can’t remember ever tasting it.  So why should The Society celebrate their important milestone by selling such a rarity?  Apparently, Bucelas was the first wine the ‘International Exhibition Cooperative Wine Society’ (as it was known then) sold after its formation in 1874 and so their anniversary was an opportune moment for them to put it back on their list.  Originally sold for 19 shillings for a dozen bottles – for those of you too young to remember pre-decimalisation coinage, that’s the equivalent of about 8p a bottle! – the crisp, fresh white is today £13.50. 

Made from the local Arinto grape variety, this is medium-bodied and unoaked with lovely apple and lime flavours and quite a long, savoury finish.  An excellent aperitif or to accompany lighter fish dishes – sole or plaice, perhaps – or oysters.  Lovers of good Muscadet or Loire Sauvignon should certainly give this a try.

But how did a wine that was obviously popular and well-known in late Victorian times, become so obscure now?  In the late 19^th century, many of the world’s vineyards were infested with Phylloxera, a bug that attacks the roots of vines.  This decimated the wine industry and, although a solution was eventually found (re-planting vines on phylloxera-resistant American vine rootstocks), this was an expensive process.  Numerous smaller growers in places like Bucelas chose a cheaper alternative and planted hybrid vines.  These produced poorer quality wines and sales never recovered.  Indeed, by the 1970s, there was only 1 Bucelas producer left, with much of the remaining land being taken over for more profitable market gardens.

A revival began in the early years of this century, cemented in 2019 when the major Portuguese producer, Sogrape, bought Quinta da Romeira with ambitious plans for its development.  If the Wine Society example we tasted, produced at Romeira, is typical, Bucelas will be a name worth looking out for in the future.

And finally, don’t forget that English Wine Week this year runs from 15^th to 23^rd June.  What better excuse for opening a bottle of the local product?

Flat Bottoms!

Yes, this is the Bristol Wine Blog, even if some readers might have thought that they had mistakenly found something else on reading the title!  But this time I’m concentrating on the bottles themselves rather than the wine inside them.

You’ll know that some wine bottles have flat bottoms whereas others have a deep indentation or ‘punt’ in the bottom (see picture left).  Why? Does a punt (or lack of one) tell us anything that might help us decide which wine to buy?

Around 300 years ago, all glass bottles were individually blown.  To ensure that the early bottles were roughly round in shape, the glassblower would turn the bottle as it was being formed using a ‘pontil rod’ attached to the bottom.  This would be cut off at the end of the process but, if the bottom was flat and a small stub remained, the bottle would rock on its base and be unstable.  Hence, the introduction of the punt to conceal this imperfection.

Today, virtually all bottles are machine-made, so does the punt still serve any useful purpose?  For sparkling wine bottles, yes.  They need to be made from specially strengthened glass to withstand the pressure inside and it has been shown that having a punt adds to this strength.  Any other wine could just as easily be stored in a flat-bottomed bottle.

That brings me to the comment that I’ve often heard that the bigger the punt, the better the wine inside the bottle.  This one is closely related to the idea that the heavier the bottler, the better the wine.  In both cases, the producer may want you to think this, but, as a way of judging quality, bottle weight and size of punt come well down the list.  Indeed, many quality-minded producers are also ecologically-minded and are now deliberately bottling their wines in lighter, usually flat-bottomed, bottles.

A move that I think is definitely worth encouraging.