Port anD the Douro uP to Date 5and white Portuguese flag planted on four continents. The Cantino map of 1502 shows that
Portugal even laid claim to the barren wastes of Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador as
Portuguese ships ventured ever further into the cold waters of the North Atlantic in search
of that most precious of Portuguese commodities: cod.
Cod (bacalhau) had become – and still remains – a staple in the day-to-day life of
Portugal. From the time of Edward III (1327–1377), codfish from the waters around
the British Isles, dried and salted to preserve it on the voyage home, was particularly
highly prized in Portugal, and wine from the vineyards of the Minho in the north of the
country became the principal currency in this trade. With a taste for bigger, full-bodied
wines from southern climes like the Spanish Lepe – famous, according to Chaucer, for its
‘fumositee’ – these northern wines were never particularly well regarded by the English.
In fact Chaucer’s French contemporary, Froissart, records that the wines from north-west
Iberia were so ‘ardent’ that the English could scarcely drink them. In his scholarly book,
The Story of Wine, Hugh Johnson recounts how archers sent by John of Gaunt had already
come across the wines of ‘Ribadavia’ and attributes them to Galicia rather than Portugal.
The modern-day Ribadave is an industrial belt corresponding to the valley of the River
Ave between Vila do Conde and Guimarães to the north of Oporto. It therefore seems
highly probable that the first Portuguese wines to reach English shores in any volume
were similar in style to the thin, rasping, red Vinhos Verdes that are produced in the
region today.
This lucrative trade – bacalhau for wine – grew after the English Reformation, launched
in 1536, and was given still greater impetus by the Commonwealth over a century later.
With fish no longer obligatory in Britain on Fridays and saints’ days, Portugal soon
became the principal market for British fish. English and Scottish merchants or ‘factors’
settled in the northern port of Viana do Castelo at the mouth of the River Lima, sourcing
and shipping wine from the hard granite country between Monção (called ‘Monson’ by
the English), Melgaço and Ponte de Lima. Known as ‘Red Portugal’, these light red wines
must have been inherently unstable and spoiled long before they reached British shores.
early wines FroM the Douro
In Portugal, the wines of the Douro region were gaining ground. The vineyards on the
south side of the river around the city of Lamego were some of the most prolific in the
country. Rui Fernandes, writing in 1531–1532, describes these vineyards as some of the
best in the kingdom producing ‘fragrant’ wines that would age ‘4, 5 and 6 years ... the
older the better...’. Evidently the production of wine was not merely limited to the area
around Lamego, for João de Barros writing in 1548 refers to ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ wines
from the northern margin of the Douro around Penaguião and Mesão Frio (the modern-
day Baixo Corgo) as well as wines from the ‘Riba Pinhão’ in today’s Cima Corgo further
upstream. Most of this wine was shipped to Oporto from where, according to Fernandes,
it found a ready market in the cities of Lisbon and Aveiro, in the countryside of Entre