Bomfim Winery
The original winery and lodge at Quinta do Bomfim dates from 1896. Our family modernised the winery in 1964 by introducing autovinificators to increase winemaking capacity. By the 1960s it was proving impractical, due to increasing labour shortages, to make all the wine by treading in stone lagares. The autovinificators have provided sterling service for over half a century and continue to do so. This facility handles a proportion of the grapes we buy from farmers in the Cima Corgo subregion, centred around the village of Pinhão.
A new modern lagar winery (pictured) was inaugurated at Quinta do Bomfim in 2015 close to the original winery. It consists of six modern lagares (for a full description of the modern lagar see the Malvedos Winery) each with a capacity of 16 pipes, which is roughly the capacity of the traditional foot-treading lagares. This new Bomfim winery is exclusively focused on producing the top ports for Dow's.
The winery uses a state-of-the-art pendulum swing destemmer which is very effective in selecting only berries in top condition before gently crushing them and conveying them to the lagares. Seven paddle plungers work alongside the lagares in a complementary role, providing supplementary extraction of colour, flavour and tannins. Rotating paddles within these steel vats immerse the grape skins into the fermenting must to obtain optimum extraction.
The Bomfim lagar winery receives all grapes harvested at the quinta and handles the production of other family owned vineyards in the vicinity of the Pinhão area. During the vintage, visitors to Quinta do Bomfim are able to view the lagares at work from a special viewing platform.