6 Port anD the Douro
Douro e Minho, on the islands of Madeira and the Azores and with the Portuguese
military. By the end of the century it is likely that wines from the Douro even found their
way to Brazil. These wines sold for five reis per quartilho (pint) as opposed to three reis for
the inferior wines from the Minho.
During the course of the sixteenth century, Portugal stretched herself to the limit.
Not for the last time in its somewhat chequered history, the overseas empire almost bled
the country to death. As able-bodied men migrated to Lisbon or journeyed overseas,
fields were left uncultivated and the country was forced to import even the most basic
foodstuffs. With all their salt beef used up, the hapless citizens of Oporto were forced to
eat offal, gaining a taste for tripe that continues to this day. The dish tripas á moda do Porto
features prominently on the menus of most Oporto restaurants and the city’s inhabitants
are known in jest as Tripeiros – tripe eaters.
The crisis point in Portugal’s century of over-expansion was reached when the hapless
King Sebastiao, ‘the regretted’, was killed fighting the Moors at the Battle of Alcazar-
Quivir in 1578, leaving no heir to the throne. After a brief interregnum under Dom
Henrique (the somewhat decrepit cardinal-king), Philip II of Spain marched into
Portugal, initiating sixty years of national humiliation. Despite England’s bitter antipathy
towards Spain, English and Scottish merchants (Protestant as well as Catholic), continued
to live in occupied Portugal, albeit without any of their former privileges. Lured perhaps
by the security of the larger city, or possibly as a result of the silting up of the port at
Viana, it was during this period that the majority of English merchants began to move
south to Oporto.
FroM wine to Port
It is a strange irony that Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan, effectively laid the foundations of
the Port trade. However the defining moment came a decade and a half later as a result
of England’s deteriorating relations with France. In 1667, Louis XIV’s minister Colbert
instituted a protectionist policy that eventually closed the French market to imports of
English cloth. In a tit-for-tat trade war, Charles II then prohibited the importation of all
French goods, including wine. Only 120 tuns (about 120,000 litres) of Portuguese wine had
been imported to London in the mid-1670s but during the embargo, between 1678 and
1685, recorded annual shipments rose sharply to 6,880 tuns (6.81 million litres). But the
English continued to favour the refined taste of claret over the wines of northern Portugal
and much of the wine that reached London during this period was almost certainly French
masquerading as Portuguese.
When war broke out between France and England in 1689, it became virtually
impossible to buy French wines. This sent the Oporto merchants in search of all the ‘Red
Portugal’ they could find. Although the early shippers were not in the habit of visiting
vineyards, their quest probably sent them upstream into the Douro valley. Hard as it is to
imagine today, the steep terraced slopes of the Douro were then mainly producing cereals.