Port - a wine born of war and adversity
Port gets its name from the city of Porto, the capital of northern Portugal and the country's second largest city after the national capital, Lisbon. The Portuguese call it vinho do Porto, and that has become its official designation, even though the grapes are grown and crushed many miles from Porto in the Douro valley. Porto lies on the Douro River, which flows all the way through from Spain, a little way before it opens up into the Atlantic. Port has to be made from grapes grown in specially designated and controlled regions around the river, and aged in barrels in the port-shippers’ lodges just across the bridge from Porto itself, in an area called Vila Nova di Gaia. Port is fully Portuguese, but much of it is sold under quintessentially British names like Croft, Graham, Taylor, Offley, Dow and Sandeman. That's because its history is enmeshed with British trade.
Porto grew as a trans-shipment centre for cargo coming down the river from other parts of the country, ready to be shipped off to Britain, Holland and the coastal towns and cities of Portugal. Wine had long been made in the region, just as it had been in any other part of Europe where grapes grew. Yet until the 18th century, when as many as 1.2 million cases of wine were being hauled down the river to Porto each year, the quality was fairly poor, and nowhere near that of the standard reached by French producers. It was the geopolitics of Western Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries that marked the main turning-points in the development of the wine that came to be called port.
The long-standing enmity between England and France led to France raising the tax on all wine exported to England, causing England to retaliate with a ban on the importation of French wine. This, together with intermittent periods of warfare between the two countries, created a shortage of wine in England. English wine merchants turned to Portugal, which had been England’s traditional ally and trading partner since 1373, when an agreement had been signed pledging 'perpetual friendship'. The first Portuguese port they went to was the nearest one to home: Porto, which is much further north than Lisbon. There, they found that the wine was not quite up to the mark, so they decided to investigate further. Journeying inland along the Douro River, they found darker and more powerful red wines but were unsure that they would travel well in ships’ holds up the coast of Portugal to England. They tried to stabilize them by adding brandy to the barrels of wine before shipping, and so the first fortified wine was born. It was very primitive and not popular, and was treated as Hobson's choice in the forced absence of French wine. Matters righted themselves after a while, but soon there was more upheaval in the wine market as the two old enemies took opposing sides in the War of Spanish Succession in the opening years of the 18th century, and found that they were in a state of renewed hostility.
In 1703, Britain and Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty, which provided for reciprocal trade – among other things, in the exchange of bolts of English cloth for Portuguese wine. We don't know how port, as we know it today, came to be created or by whom. As these things go, there are various apocryphal tales about it. In any event, some time at the end of the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th, someone came up with the idea of halting the wine's fermentation process, while it was still sweet, fruity and strong, by adding brandy to it.
By this time, several port houses had been set up in Porto by English and Scottish merchants. First they served merely as transport offices, but soon the merchants were risking their capital to buy the standing grape harvest. By the first half of the 18th century, wine-making in the Douro valley had reached unprecedented proportions. Vineyards were carved out of the hard and rocky hills entirely by hand, in terraces so narrow that they are barely wide enough for a person to pass along with comfort. Those terraces still survive today, and their breath-taking beauty and the astonishing work that went into them have made them a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Practices were revolutionized: wooden barrels substituted the old resin-treated goatskins, and there was organized transportation down the river to Porto, in Arab-style river barges with lateen sails, called barcos rabelos (pronounced ha-BEL-os). In the suburb called Vila Nova de Gaia, just across the bridge and a short walk away from downtown Porto, the wine merchants built warehouses, where they stored their wine and administered their booming businesses. Those warehouses remain in use today, and they are still called port-shippers lodges.
In 1727, the British port merchants organized themselves into an association to gain negotiating leverage against the Portuguese wine-makers, and in 1790 they gave this concrete shape by having built the Feitoria Inglesa, or the Factory House. Its design was influenced by the typical wealthy English town house of the late 18th century, with an impressive sweeping staircase, crystal chandeliers and a splendid ballroom. The original price-dampening purpose of the Factory House was short-lived. By 1814, it was effectively a private club for port-shippers. Today, its doors remain closed to non-members, who may visit only by invitation.
Another landmark in the development of port wine came in the 1730s, when scandal erupted. Get-rich-quick wine-makers had been adding sugar and elderberry juice to their wine to give it a sweetness and colour that it did not otherwise have. When the quality of the wine plummeted, the price rapidly followed. By 1750, matters were so out of control that the King of Portugal, Joseph I, dispatched from Lisbon his minister, the Marques de Pombal, to sort things out. With the support of a group of notables, he set up a company with the achieved aim of improving the quality of port, and ended the monopoly of the British port-shippers, though they retained their remarkable involvement in the trade. After that, the Portuguese entered the port market, with Dona Antonia Ferreira, whose port house remains in business today, first and foremost among them.
The new company – Companhia Gerald a Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro was officially granted the power to regulate the quantities of port produced, to fix the minimum and maximum prices for its sale and purchase, and to arbitrate in all port-related disputes. In 1756, it set out the boundaries of the grape-growing regions for the production of port, making the Douro valley the world's first demarcated area for grape-growing and wine-making. The vines immediately outside those boundaries were ripped out of the ground against the will of their owners, causing riots and civil unrest, with many victims. All the elderberry trees in the whole of northern Portugal went the same way.
Despite the harshness of the method, or perhaps because of it, a golden age for vintage port followed, and in the 19th century many vintages were declared. The last great vintage of that golden age was in 1878, just before the vine disease phylloxera struck and devastated vineyards right across Europe. By doing as the French did, and grafting their vines onto American rootstock, the owners of the Douro River wine estates were able to avoid disaster, though only just. Within a few years, millions of gallons of port were being shipped to Britain once more.