Este restaurante abriu recentemente, inspirado numa filosofia diferente, pois está vocacionado para servir tapas e petiscos, dando verdadeira importância à harmonia entre o vinho e a comida. Bem hajam por esta atitude. Fazem falta lugares assim, onde o vinho não fica na sombra e onde se cultiva o prazer da sua degustação.

O Nelson, que é o proprietário, tem organizado neste espaço diversos jantares vínicos, e mostrou interesse em fazer um onde servisse apenas vinhos das Cortes de Cima. Como coruchense que sou (aí nascida e criada!), fiquei logo interessada em representar, na minha terra, a adega e os vinhos que tenho ajudado a elaborar.

Foi, por isso, com orgulho que, perante cerca de 45 pessoas, interessantes e interessadas, apresentei os vinhos das Cortes de Cima.

O jantar começou com o Chaminé Branco e o Chaminé Tinto 2007, a acompanharem umas maravilhosas Gambas à Guillo e uma Copita de Porco Preto, respectivamente. Eram os primeiros vinhos a serem servidos, e os comensais já diziam que era difícil fazer melhor, que aquela combinação tinha sido a ideal.

Seguiram-se uns Nacos de Toiro Bravo (ou não estivéssemos numa terra ribatejana), em perfeita sintonia com o Cortes de Cima 2006, uma novidade no mercado e que mereceu elogiosas críticas. O Syrah 2004 entrou a seguir e acompanhou bem os Nacos, mas também combinou com a posterior tábua de queijos.

Estes eram todos portugueses e bastante fortes (Serra da Estrela, Azeitão, Crato e Picante da Gardunha), e o Aragonês 2004 caiu na perfeição. Com boa estrutura, final longo e taninos vivos e polidos, este vinho foi unanimemente considerado um grande alentejano.

O Aragonês 2004 estendeu-se e ainda mostrou que, mesmo com umas azevias feitas a preceito, não se deixa intimidar.

E assim demos por encerrada esta prova, que me deixou sobejamente satisfeita por notar que todos os presentes ficaram agradados com a consistência e qualidade dos vinhos apresentados.

And during those 30 years,  Hong Kong with it’s 6.9 million people, has just kept growing skywards,  dispelling fears that the British handing over to China in 1997 would threaten it’s prosperity.

Cliff See (fotos below), of Appellation/ Wine Culture Ltd. has been selling our wines in Hong Kong since 2001, where they are listed in such prestigious venues as the Club Lusitano, The China Club and the Hong Kong Bankers Club, amongst others.

Cliff and I had a chuckle to learn that we share the same Alma Mater, UC Berkeley, and we calculated that we must have been on the campus during the same era (the hippie seventies!).

Due to popular demand, Chef Bjarne Otto has agreed to share his recipe for his special Cortes de Cima Olive Oil Christmas Cake. The cake was a big hit last weekend, at our annual Danish Christmas lunch and wine tasting, which took place for Adega Club members here at the winery tasting room.

Cortes de Cima Olive Oil Christmas Cake

What to use:

700 gr. Pumpkin

300 gr. Brown Sugar

300 gr. Toasted Bread crumbs

200 gr. Carrots

3,5 dl. Cortes de Cima Extra Virgin Olive Oil

4 Eggs

150 gr. Raisins

150 gr. Walnuts

100 gr. Dates

100 gr. Figs

1 teaspoon yeast

3 teaspoons cinnamon

2 teaspoons dried Ginger

½ teaspoon Allspices

A little dash black ground pepper,

2 cl. Rum

2 cl. Brandy

Dried fruit like Cherries, Orange, Lemon etc. in cubes.

250 gr. Icing sugar

What to do:

Peel and cut the Pumpkin in small pieces, boil in water until tender, sieve, and mash the Pumpkins, and let it cool for a while.

Whip the Eggs with the brown Sugar with a hand mixer and add the Cortes de Cima Extra Virgin Olive Oil while whipping all the time, then the Toasted Bread crumbs, Yeast, the mashed Pumpkins and the peeled and grinded Carrots, Rum and Brandy, all the spices and the dried fruits cut in small cubes.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. and oil a Charlotte form and pour the mass into the form. Bake in the middle of the oven for one hour. Take the cake out; let it rest in the form for 15 minutes, then take it out of the form, and let it cool off on a tray. When cold, decorate with icing sugar turned with a few drops of Rum or water, decorate with dried fruit and serve.

Enjoy with a glass of Cortes de Cima Syrah or Incógnito and have yourself a very, merry Christmas!

-Chef Bjarne Otto

Last weekend, with stormy wintery weather bringing some much-needed rain to fill our damns and irrigate our fields, we decorated our winery tasting room with scandinavian christmas elves, candles, and plenty of yuletide cheer, and opened our doors wide to our Cortes de Cima Adega Club Members for our annual Danish Christmas Lunch and wine tasting.

Chef Bjarne Otto piled the buffet tables high with traditional danish christmas delicacies (menu below), and the guests experimented to find their own best wine and food pairing combinations, i.e. marinated herrings and Aragonez, roast pork with red cabbage and Syrah, rice and almond pudding with cherry sauce and Chaminé!

The following day, the merriment, eating and drinking was repeated all over again,  as we held our annual employees Christmas party at the same venue, and with the same delicious menu of course! For many of our Portuguese employees and their families, the Danish menu is one of their most adventurous culinary experiences of the year!  (We’ve uploaded loads of more pictures from the 2 days here on Flickr.)

Danish Xmas Menu

Variety of marinated herrings

Gravad Laks with dill dressing

Fried fish fillets with remoulade

Danish pork meatballs with cucumber salad

Homemade liverpaste with mushrooms and bacon

Roast pork with red cabbage

Cheese platter with fruit

Rice and almond pudding with cherry sauce (Riz à l’amande)

Everyone at Cortes de Cima joins together in sending you our wishes for peace, goodwill and happiness during the Christmas season and for the coming New Year 2009.

One can say that our philosophy in olive oil harvesting is the total opposite to harvesting wine grapes. With olives, we carefully select the greener, less ripe fruit for picking, while for wine grapes, fully ripened fruit is our goal. These green, unripe olives give our oil it’s unique characteristics, i.e. a deep greenish yellow color, a green grassy aroma, and a fresh, lightly piquant flavour.

Our aim is to produce a fresh, grassy olive oil, with low acidity, which we get by harvesting early. Early harvest, of course has it’s down side in that it results in a very low extraction rate of only 12% oil to fruit (normal 18%), but the bonus is an olive oil with an extremely low acidity (less than 0,2%FFA) and a higher polyphenol content.

The olive harvest lasted for 3 arduous weeks, during which our workforce of 16 women and 10 men picked olives on a daily basis. At the end of each day, the olives are taken to the lagar (olive oil factory) where it is imperative that the oil is extracted (a cold extraction without using any chemicals) the same day they are harvested.

Harvest quantity was very low in 2008, at 200.000 kgs from 50 ha of 15 year old Cobrançosa olive trees. This lower yield was mostly due to the weather conditions during flowering, when many flowers were aborted, resulting in a lower fruit production.

Just as we were finishing our olive harvest by end November, our neighbours were just getting ready to start their own harvests of their much riper black olives. A harvest which can last sometimes well into February or March depending on the particular olive variety.

]]> http://cortesdecima.com/2008/12/there%e2%80%99s-no-rest-for-the-wicked/feed/ http://cortesdecima.com/2008/12/there%e2%80%99s-no-rest-for-the-wicked/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CortesDeCima/~3/485488415/ http://cortesdecima.com/2008/12/cortes-de-cima-90-points-in-montreal/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:05:45 +0000 Jose Eduardo http://cortesdecima.com/?p=1334 Montreal has been for many years, our largest export market. It is said that Montrealians are very fond of their wine! We just received this report from our importer there -

“Hello! Here, we had two storms this week so there is a lot of snow!

There is a nice article written by Nick Hamilton. This guy writes in a weekly newspaper called “Voir Montréal”. Click here to access the reference!

Cortes de Cima 2005 - 90 points -Élaboré dans un style qui rappelle davantage le Nouveau Monde, ce vin portugais induira un bon nombre d’oenophiles en erreur. Son nez de fruits noirs et de prunes séduit. Riche et ample, cet excellent pinard plaira aux amateurs de vins modernes chaleureux. Affinité assurée avec le magret de canard sauce au porto.

Have a nice week-end!”

Alexandre St-Pierre, Vins Balthazard

The picture is of Vitor Sobral and myself being interviewed by Helder Fernando from Rádio Macau about gastronomy and wine. (audiofile under ‘outras rubricas’- Vinhos e gastronomia portuguesa 07-11-2008 19:40:11)

Among the other interesting people I met in this former Portuguese outpost, was Konstantin Bessmertny, one of the most distinguished artists working in Asia today. Kontantin studied at the Art School in his native city, Blagoveschensk, former USSR, and completed his training at the Fine Arts Institute of Vladivostok. In 1993 he moved to Macau. The painting shown below, named ‘Vino Veritas Est‘  (transl.= Wine is Truth) hangs in our Macau importer Vino Veritas‘ wine cellar. It depicts the artist’s view of various stages of wine appreciation. Thomas Pimenta, of Vino Veritas  holds the Reserva (below).

Link to our previous post from this trip to Macau

Winter has finally arrived in the Alentejo. Already in early December the first early morning frosts have arrived, and the winter long task of pruning the vines has begun with a kick start.  Some might assume that nothing much goes on in the vineyard once the leaves have fallen off and the vines lay dormant, but pruning is actually one of the most labour intensive periods, as the workforce slowly progress though the vineyard during the long winter months.

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I was fortunate to be part of the group of 14 adventurous Portuguese winemakers who travelled to India in November, on our first forage into this promising new market. New Delhi, Goa and Mumbai were the venues of the biggest ever tastings of Portuguese wines ever to be shown in India.

“While presenting wines, Subhash Arora, President of the India Wine Academy, opened his talk at the home of the Portuguese Ambassador by asking his audience if they had heard of Mateus, Vinho Verde and Port. Of course the majority of the audience said yes. He then went on to ask who had heard of Dao, Bairrada, Douro? And grape varieties such as Touriga Nacional, Trincadeira and Alvarinho. Apart from the Portuguese guests there was a general shaking of heads at these names. This was the journey we had in front of us, an exploration into the many different wines of Portugal; displayed by 14 wine producers and exporters who were keen to share their products with us and improve our knowledge of the great wines Portugal had to offer.” - Liz McMaster.

We do think that Cortes de Cima’s style of intense, fruit driven wines, with soft supporting tannins match well with the strong flavours of Indian cuisine. We wholeheartedly agree with Harshal Shah, of Sommelier India - ‘It’s such a shame that these styles of wines are not imported into India as they would surely be a success with the domestic palate.’

But, Portuguese winemakers should not be caught napping, just because India has a large population (1.1 billion), doesn’t make it an easy market! At the same time as we were pouring our wines in New Delhi, the Indians clinched a 2-0 series win over Australia in the final Test in Nagpur. Cricket of course. But such a victory on the cricket pitch, could be mirrored in the wine industry.

India is quickly establishing itself as a wine producing country in it’s own right. At the tasting, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Abhay Kewadkar, chief winemaker for the Four Season Vineyards, whose vineyards are in the lush rolling hills of the Western Ghats, and winery is located near Pune, Maharashtra. They produce some excellent wines from Sauvignon and Chenin Blanc, Cabernet, Shiraz and Zinfandel varietals. Yes, excellent Indian wines! Portuguese winemakers should not underestimate the local competition!

Grover Hills is another Indian brand to look out for. Nestled in the Nandi Hills of Bangalore, they claim to have a special microclimate, shielding their vines of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc grapes from the fury of the monsoon rains. They can also boast of no less than Michel Rolland as their consultant winemaker!

This trip to India was a personal odyssey for me, in that I finally had a chance to visit the country of birth of my stepfather, Frederick R. Vandyke III. Shortly before his death in 2007 he told me- “My Grandfather invented the “Vandyke Process” which is still in use today, and received a commendation from the King. He invented it in India where he worked for the Civil Service (RAJ) on the Survey of India. His son, my Father, also worked for the Civil Service in India, prior to Independence. I was born in Calcutta (where we lived). My Uncle was the last Finance Minister of the British Rule in India, and as such, knighted. Another Uncle ran a jute mill in what is now Bangladesh. My family were all British. I have been an American since Post World War II, and am now 85.”

I made a special pilgrimage to visit his last Indian residence in Mumbai (then Bombay), on the street where Mahatma Gandhi lived.

]]> http://cortesdecima.com/2008/11/a-portuguese-passage-to-india/feed/ http://cortesdecima.com/2008/11/a-portuguese-passage-to-india/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CortesDeCima/~3/464934237/ http://cortesdecima.com/2008/11/library-wines-drink-now-or-cellar/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:19:04 +0000 Carrie Jorgensen http://cortesdecima.com/?p=1134 “How well do Alentejan table wines age in general, and more specifically, Cortes de Cima wines age?” This is a question we are constantly asked, and one which lead us to decide to participate in a recent debut ‘Library Collection’ tasting, a new initiative organized by MWsTim Atkin and Charles Metcalfe. In their own words: “The International Wine Challenge is acknowledged as the most influential blind tasting in the world. The Library Collection is a natural extension of this as it follows the same rigorous judging principles. The aim of the Library Collection is to demonstrate to consumers the merits of premium wines and their cellaring potential.”

Each year, they will taste wines that are 10 years old and 5 years old. Therefore for the 2008 tasting, we sent our Cortes de Cima Reserva 1998 and our Cortes de Cima Reserva 2003 for this new appraisal and judging. We were excited to see our wines with top ratings and showing an ageing potential of 14 years!

Cortes de Cima Reserva 1998 - 90 points - ‘Big, ripe, smoky, showing some development with ripe, sweet fruit on the palate and generous acidity, fine tannins and a long, sweet finish. Drink now through 2012.’

Cortes de Cima Reserva 2003 - 88 points - ‘Showing some maturity, black cherry and smoky character on the nose. Quite rounded with crisp acidity. Good length and intensity. Drink now through 2012.‘

During the first ever visit on behalf of Robert Parker to Cortes de Cima in August 2007, Mark Squires undertook a similar exercise, albeit even more extensive, as he included every single RESERVA we have ever launched - 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2004. In his words - “this vertical tasting showed what the winery can accomplish. These library wines may be hard to find in well stored condition, even at the winery, but they are worth noting here to show what this winery can do and how well these can age.” All wines were rated above 90 points, and with an estimated ageing potential of up to 16 years!

“The 1998 RESERVA is simply beautiful, perhaps the best wine I have tasted from this winery. If this is what they turn into, maybe it’s time to start cellaring them and stop diving into them so soon. It is nicely structured, intense, still powerful and focused. There is just a touch of cream on the texture of the finish. Flavorful and aromatic, it is particularly succulent on the finish, and it has aged very gracefully.” - The Wine Advocate.

Parker Points:

Cortes de Cima Reserva 1997 - 90 Points - Drink - to 2010

Cortes de Cima Reserva 1998 - 93 Points - Drink - to 2014

Cortes de Cima Reserva 2001 - 91 Points - Drink - to 2014

Cortes de Cima Reserva 2003 - 92 Points - Drink - to 2016

Cortes de Cima Reserva 2004 - 91 Points - Drink - to 2016