Croft

Natasha Bridge represents the next generation of the Robertson family in the Port trade, and is a descendant of the Yeatman line of Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman. Her father, Alistair Robertson, is chairman of the Fladgate Partnership.

AN ACUTE TASTE MEMORY

Bridge studied at UC Davis and then moved to London to work with the famous U.K. wine importer Mentzendorff & Company before returning to Portugal to work in the blending room. With a phenomenal memory for the Ports she has tasted over the years and an unmovable drive for quality and complexity, she is certainly the leading lady in Port today. 

Working closely with David Guimaraens, the group’s wine director, Bridge and the blending team were able to use their immense expertise to improve the Croft Ports’ global reputation. Innovating at the same time, Bridge was able to lead the development of a new category of Port – Croft Pink.

Natasha Bridge is a mother of three children and is married to Adrian Bridge, the CEO of the Fladgate Partnership. She devotes any spare time to yoga, skiing and an eclectic stable of pets.

The Croft family can be traced back 700 years, and first became involved with Port wine shipping through their connection with a distinguished family of merchants, the Thompsons of York, through marriage. It was only natural that the two families should combine their business interests in the wine trade.

A great-grandchild of this union, John Croft, was born in 1732 and was to become the most famous personality in the house. He traveled regularly between York, where he was sheriff for quite some time, and Oporto, and was a member of the British Factors, who built the historic Factory House in 1790 that still stands today. In 1788, his treatise on the wines of Portugal was published, an event that placed the Croft family at the forefront of the British community based in Oporto.

Croft’s treatise allows great insight into the early days of the Port wine trade. When British shippers first started to buying and selling Port it was not a fortified wine but rather a heavyweight wine that was probably no more than 12% alcohol by volume. There is no exact date for when Port became fortified to help stabilize the wine on its long journey to Britain, but John Croft mentioned monasteries in the Douro that were adding brandy earlier in the fermentation process, producing an off-dry Port. These slightly sweeter Port wines became popular in Britain and prompted growers to begin adding the brandy earlier in the fermentation process. The sweet Port wine that we know now finally evolved by the mid-18th century.

By 1827, Croft & Co. had become the fourth largest Port wine shipper. One hundred years later, the company occupied the number one position. The house of Croft enjoys a major reputation for its Vintage Ports in particular and acquired Quinta da Roêda in 1875 from John Fladgate, Baron of Roêda and a partner in the Taylor firm.

Croft has aged its wines on the same premises in Oporto since the 19th century. These include the famous Terreirinho vault, the longest Port wine lodge of all, which measures over 140 meters from end to end. The company’s cellars house an extensive and rare collection of vintage Port, including some that have never been sold. 

A new winery began operation upriver at Quinta da Roêda in 2002. There, state of the art fermentation tanks were installed, modeled on a design developed by Taylor Fladgate & Yeatman’s winemaking team. These Port-Toes, as they have come to be known, aim to emulate the action of the human foot by the use of pistons to macerate the wine. The team have also reinstalled a large number of traditional granite lagares in which to tread the grapes for the vintage and single-quinta wines by foot.

Croft today is part of the Fladgate Partnership, made up of three of the most historic and highly regarded Porto houses: Taylor Fladgate, Fonseca, and Croft. Their Portos are produced with the attention to quality that is the standard to which all other Port wine houses aspire. It is a family-run company with the present members representing the eighth generation of the Yeatman family, originally from the Port house of Taylor Fladgate & Yeatman, now with more than 300 years of history. The group owns several of the best-known wine estates in the Douro Valley—including the famous Quinta de Vargellas and Quinta do Panascal—totalling more than 290 hectares of A-classified vineyard. It also has interests in tourism and catering.

The Douro Valley extends across northern Portugal and into Spain, a deep cleft along the Douro River that creates precipitous vineyards where terraces have been used for hundreds of years to create level strips of ground where vines can grow.

The primarily schist soils are barren and low in nutrients. The climate is hot, but much depends on elevation and aspect in the vineyards—higher elevation fruit ripens later, while lower, south-facing fruit ripens sooner. The Serra do Marão creates a barrier at the Atlantic coast that blocks rains from the ocean, causing progressively drier conditions as the Douro Valley proceeds east toward the Spanish border.

While some Porto producers have begun releasing single-quinta (single-vineyard) Portos from estate vineyards, it is still traditional for fruit to be sourced from selected partners among the thousands of small farmers in the Douro Valley. Croft uses fruit from its own Quinta da Roêda for its vintage and single-quinta portos; for Croft’s other bottlings, fruit is carefully sourced from partner growers.

In the Douro Valley there is a common saying, attributed to the 19th-century poet Vega Cabral: “If the wine district were a golden ring, Roêda would be the diamond.” This magnificent property was probably planted early in the 18th century, during the great surge in demand for Port following the 1703 Methuen Treaty, under which England agreed to levy one-third less duty on Portuguese wine than on French. Previously owned by Taylor Fladgate & Yeatman, it was acquired by John Fladgate personally in 1862. With the marriage of Fladgate’s daughter to a Croft, the property passed into the House of Croft in 1875.

Today Quinta da Roêda consists of 270 acres planted with approximately 332,000 vines. It is located on the north bank of the Douro just to the east of Pinhão in the Cima Corgo growing region, an area that has traditionally been considered the center of the highest-quality Porto viticulture. Quinta da Roêda is the cornerstone of Croft’s reputation as a producer of superb vintage and vintage-style Portos. Its characteristically plump, full, vigorously fruity wines, with their hallmark aroma of gum cistus, the aromatic bush, are the quintessence of the inimitable Croft house style.

Since 1991 David Guimaraens has played a leading role in the production of the Fladgate Partnership’s wines and in the development of its wineries and vineyards. He represents the sixth generation of his family to be involved in making the company’s wines, following in the footsteps of his father, Bruce Guimaraens, the legendary winemaker responsible for the wines of Fonseca between 1961 and 1995.

David Guimaraens was born in Oporto, Portugal. After completing his schooling in Portugal and England, he spent time gaining hands-on winemaking experience in Australia, California and Oregon before undertaking formal education in enology at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia.

After graduating, he remained in Australia to gain additional experience before returning to Portugal in 1990 to join the Taylor Fladgate and Fonseca winemaking teams.

As technical director and head winemaker of the Fladgate Partnership since 1991, Guimaraens is responsible for the group’s extensive wine inventories and for coordinating the work of the blending panel led by chief blender Natasha Bridge. Guimaraens also leads the team responsible for winemaking in the group’s wineries and on the Taylor Fladgate, Fonseca and Croft estates. The research and development work carried out under Guimaraens’ leadership has resulted in new vinification technology that has radically enhanced the quality of the wines made from the production of the group’s partner grape growers.

Guimaraens also works closely with the group’s head of viticulture, António Magalhães, one of the Douro’s most respected viticulturists and a world authority on mountain viticulture, in managing and developing the Taylor Fladgate, Fonseca and Croft vineyard estates. Together they have created an award-winning sustainable vineyard model that is set to become the standard for environmentally responsible viticulture in the Douro Valley.