1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

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In the PoH Wine Country.

enters througli tlie few small windows. The walls, however,are periodically whitewashed,so that the lodge has not that dingy, gloomy appearance distinctive ofthetypicalYilla Nova wine-store. Some years ago one of the outer walls of this lodge gave way, and the roof of the outside cume,several hundred feet in length, fell in with a crash. Fortunately this happened on a Sunday, when none of the handswere at work,and the doors and windows being closed prevented the air from suddenly escaping, causing the roof,with its network of heavy timbers and its mass of tdes, to fall comparatively slowly, and do scarcely any damage to the couple of thousand pipes of wine on which the heavy mass descended. At Martinez, Gassiot, and Co.'s no mechanical appliances have been introduced to economise manual labour. They never vat their wines; and,with the exception of a small iron truck for moving the pipes from one place to another, everything is done as in the old days when the firm was first established and Port wine was in high renown,counting its five and six bottle men, like Lords Eldon, Stowell, Panmure, Dufferin, and Blayney. These were the palmytimes when Senhor Martinez,the head of the finn,was fond of inculcating the famous Oporto maxim:— "Ifit is a good vintage, sell your coat, sell the shirt off your back, sell your skin, if you can get any one to buy it, in order to purchase wine." At the time of our visit, in place of the portable pumps and flexible tubing with which several of the more modem establish ments are provided,we found barefooted matulas striding along in single file with canefos filled with wine, in course of being transferred from one pipe to another. In an open space a number of pipes recently painted over with a mixture of wine-lees and black earth, in accordance with the prevalent Oporto fashion, were being got ready for shipment,and having the marks ofthe house to which they were consigned deej)ly incised with awkward- looking tools, which the workmen handled with remarkable dexterity. The pipes are conveyed to the Douro by bullock- carts down a remarkably steep incline communicating with the