Port anD the Douro uP to Date 31‘The village of Pinhão comprises a cluster of small houses, and some half-a-dozen wine
stores, grouped indiscriminately on the banks of the Douro. It boasts a straggling,
undulating praça, planted with a few trees, on one of which there was usually hanging
a newly slaughtered sheep, which the butcher would be cutting up, while women waited
to secure the primer parts for their husbands at work on the railway in the course of
construction on the opposite bank of the Douro,^2 and on the railway bridge that spans the
River Pinhão. A venda, a barber’s shop, and one or two general dealers’ stores look on to
the praça, and in the short winding streets of the village, children, pigs, dogs and poultry
mingle indiscriminately before the cottage doors. Such are the main features of Pinhão,
which, from its central position, is a place of some importance in the Alto Douro region.’Writing nearly twenty years later in his book Viticultura e Vinicultura, Villarinho de
São Romão describes Pinhão (with some optimism) as ‘an important place with a great
commercial future’. A contemporary photograph of Pinhão in the same publication shows
the terraces at Quinta da Foz destroyed by phylloxera.
Other villages in the Douro were clearly picturesque but insanitary. Vizetelly visited
Celleirós (archaic spelling) where he notes:
‘...the squalid houses, rudely built, are too frequently grimy on the outside and foul
within. The roads are often filthy in the extreme, smells undefinable assail one’s nostrils
as much from the open doorways as from the refuse littered street ... Turning from the
houses the eye lights on dirty children, yelping curs, emaciated poultry and, above all,
long-legged pigs, basking at full length in the middle of the road, disdaining to move out
of your horse’s way...’Nearly a century and a half later, pigs are no longer in evidence but the famous Douro dogs
still bask in the middle of the road, moving grudgingly when a car draws close.
new wealth
Such was the devastating impact of phylloxera on European vineyards that the French
government offered a reward of 300,000 francs to anyone who came up with a remedy. The
prize was never paid, for no remedy as such has ever been found. The solution came instead
from the North American vines that had almost certainly been the carriers of phylloxera in
the first place. American species like Vitis labrusca, berlandieri, riparia and rupestris were able
to resist phylloxera in a way that the European Vitis vinifera could not. By grafting native
vines on to American rootstock, it was established that European varieties could survive and
indeed flourish.
The replanting of vineyards was a slow and somewhat erratic process. For a time the
Portuguese government prohibited the importation of American vines, believing them to
be the cause of phylloxera rather than a cure. However, some clandestine replanting on