🍷 Lagar

A lagar is a wide granite tank in Portugal where grapes were trodden by foot. The tank is best known from the Douro valley, home of Port. Because the tank is wide and shallow, the skins stay in contact with the juice for a long time. The Douro and Port Wine Institute writes about it, and the Symington family still copies its shape.

The Douro and Port Wine Institute describes how it used to go. The date of harvest was once fixed by the municipality. Groups of men, women and children walked to the quintas with accordions, drums and iron triangles, and the treading went on with music and song, sometimes far into the night. Then the must fermented, shy at first and lively later, and the result was a dark, dense, strong wine.

Until the 1960s most Port was made this way. After that, people left the Douro, villages aged, and hand labour grew harder to find. Producers stuck with the lagar wherever they could, because they felt it gave excellent Port.

In the 1990s the Symington family copied the lagar in stainless steel with automation. Prototypes ran in 1998 and 1999, and the first three units went into Quinta dos Malvedos in 2000. The shape is the same; the feet are mechanical. So the Lagar lives on, as a tank and as a custom. For the technique, see Foot treading. Georgia has a cousin of the lagar, the Satsnakheli.