17%
500 ml bottle
Filipa Pato website wrote:Região: Bairrada
Castas: Baga
Ano: 2010
Vol. Alcoolico: 17%
The 2010 ESPIRITO DE BAGA is a fortified wine from Baga.
The saga starts centuries ago. After years of quarrels between the French and the English, the latter needed to find an alternative for French wines. This they found in Portugal. To make sure the wine didn’t deteriorate during the journey to Britain, they treated it with a hefty dose of brandy. Like our ancestors in Bairrada, and being proud of the pure richness of the Baga grape, we use brandy of Baga wine.
Once picked, the Baga grapes are piled into a wide wooden lagar ,introduced in Roman times. We crush the grapes by feet. The human foot exerts just the right pressure on the grapes: enough to extract colour and tannin, but not enough to break the bitter pips. When we have the alcohol level we want to achieve, the wine is run off the skins. We fortify with our illustrious brandy of Baga wine, which stops the fermentation and leaves the residual sweetness in the wine.
The Espirito, or Spirit, as you now know why, is bottled after two years of aging in authentic old barrels called pipas. In the bottle it can age for 15 years or more. It will soften into a delicious, slightly sweet and perfumed wine with the most delicious blend of blackberry, blackcurrant, cherry and damson fruits, a tobacco or herby spice and a peppery heart.
It will be a great match with all hard cheeses, blue cheeses and desserts with red fruits and dark noble chocolates. Enjoy it by preference decanted and at 10 – 12 °C and let the spirit of Baga come over you again and again and again…
Up front I should say that Baga is my single-varietal favourite caste - whenever I find a new wine web site, that's what I search for first.
So, when I stumbled upon this on the Portugal Vineyards website, buying a bottle was a no-brainer - Baga wine fortified with Baga-brandy - it had my name written all over it.
Decanted at 6pm: Very little sediment. The colour of black-cherry juice. Rich, round, gentle warmth, moorish - long finish.
D + 1: (OK, so I got impatient!) I should point out that I’m drinking this, as it suggests on the bottle, cool - between 10°C and 12°C. Deep purple. Long legs. Nose with alcohol and dark fruit - not unlike some of the LBVs I’ve tried, but somehow more simple. But honest. OK. Let’s pop it in the mouth. black cherries again, blueberries, maybe a bilberry or two. Slight grip, slightly sweet - nice warmth in the throat. Perhaps a tad sweeter than most LBVs I’ve had, but it’s getting away with it. I’m smiling - this really IS “Baga Port”. OK. let’s wait for the finish. . . . a few minutes - but a medium-length half-life. I’m liking this, but we’ll see how it goes - it wasn’t particularly cheap, and that was before I knew it was a small bottle.
D + 18: Pretty much like it was yesterday. You can certainly taste the Baga in it. Finish seems shorter than last night. I don’t know if I should be comparing it to “Port”, but I’m going to - a little less “rich”, slightly more “brandy”, a little less heat.
Summary: This was everything I had hoped it might be - it has elegance, style and tastes distinctly of Baga. It's really easy to drink.
If I had to criticize, I think it’s a little too “brandy”, a little "smooth", but that may change over time. At just shy of 30 euros for a 500ml bottle, I think it’s a little expensive, but not so expensive that, in the interests of scientific investigation, I hesitated long before ordering another 6 bottles - the next one for this time next year, and we’ll see how it’s evolving.