for me, Port Wine is frozen history. It enables us to appreciate something from the past - a footstep in the sand of time, a greeting from previous generations.
Imagine you find yourself an affordable Vintage 1908 and sit together with some friends and enjoy a great evening.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to attach some faces to this wine? The women that helped harvesting it? How did the storage look where it was stored? Who was responsible to insert the cork into the bottle?
I think to know how the world looked back then helps us to appreciate our old Port Wine even more.
Please see here a few photos from my photo stream on Flickr. All these photos were taken between 1900 and 1908.
Here are the women that worked hard for us in the hot sun to harvest the grapes:
At the end of the harvesting, the people are getting paid:
Let's get the wine towards the river:
Now we have to get the wine from the Douro Valley to Gaia:
Wouldn't this be nice - to have these "pipas" nowadays? A few hundred barrels of Vintages from around 1900? This is the storage of Silva & Cosens:
The pipas are getting ready to receive the new wine:
These are the most important guys - they are in charge of tasting, blending and quality control:
These girls are responsible for getting the cork into the bottle - but please don't blame them if 100 years later your wine is slightly corked...
Maybe it's because I'm in the midlife-crisis - but I really think that I would have loved to work together with this group of beautiful Portuguese women:
And from Gaia the wine is going to be exported in countries all over the world:
So, I hope you liked my little sentimental journey into the past. Let us thank all these hard working, lousy paid people for their efforts - without them we wouldn't be able to enjoy these old vintages nowadays...
Greetings,
Christian
"I believe I am responsible for 4% of the port wine consumption in my country..."
Xmas Off-line 
