Douro wines 245for men’. The wine accompanying stately lunches at the Factory House or in the shipper’s
lodges was usually a parsimonious glass of rather weedy local red. All the serious talk took
place at the end of the meal over a decanter of vintage Port.
revival
The modern revival of the Douro’s unfortified wines can be dated precisely to 1952, the first
vintage of the wine named Barca Velha. Its success caused other producers to sit up and take
notice and twenty years later a flurry of new Douro wines began to appear on the market.
Initially they were no more than a byproduct, made from grapes surplus to the annual Port
benefício. In a productive year perhaps half the region’s grapes would be directed into Port
while the remainder (mostly from the more lowly rated vineyards) would be fermented
out to make a dry red wine. Production techniques were outmoded, with vinification
(often autovinification) still geared towards the extraction of tannin for the production
of Port. With a complete absence of temperature control the resulting wines were stewed,
fruitless and astringent. There were a few exceptions, however. The Symingtons, who have
now launched their own range of Douro wines, made a few experimental wines for home
consumption. Made from surplus Port grapes, a 1970 red produced at Quinta do Bomfim
(tasted in 1998) still retained its deep colour and hugely powerful sinewy tannins. It must
have started out akin to ‘black-strap’, the derisive term used to describe the strong Douro
reds exported to Britain in the early eighteenth century.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of other Port producers began to look
seriously at Douro wine. Fernando Nicolau de Almeida’s son João inherited his father’s
curiosity and began experimenting for Ramos Pinto. Frustrated by the benefício which left
him with a surplus of grapes at a C-grade property, Miguel Champalimaud at Quinta do
Côtto also began looking at ways to create added value from unfortified wine. However
with these few exceptions, unfortified Douro reds continued to embody the principle that
has dogged Portugal’s wine industry for years: great potential, rarely realised. The entire
wine industry was given an enormous fillip by Portugal’s accession to the then European
Community in 1986. This brought the necessary finance to some of the continent’s
poorest regions and in the early 1990s, sometimes from one vintage to the next, many
wineries were re-equipped with up-to-date technology. Yet there remained a lack of
technical expertise – not to mention winemaking flair – among producers blinkered by
their total commitment to Port. ‘Why waste good grapes on consumo when you can make
them into Port?’ was a common cry well into the 1990s. One leading Port shipper still
holds this view.
Over the past fifteen years, a new generation of winemakers (many with experience
outside Portugal) have brought new life to the Douro. The leading light is Dirk Niepoort
who took over the reins of his family Port shipper in the mid-1990s. Unlike his father who
rarely ventured into the Douro, Dirk (who had already built up a fine, eclectic wine cellar
at home) was continually scouring the region for plots of old vines with the potential to