Port anD the Douro uP to Date 33Men who shaPeD the Douro
the Galegos
in the nineteenth century, Galicia in north west spain was much poorer than the north
of Portugal. consequently there was a steady migration of Galegos (Galicians) to the
douro in search of work. Joseph James Forrester recorded that the douro ‘is very
unwholesome and thinly populated’ and that ‘the soil about the vines is turned and the
grapes are trodden entirely by Gallegos of whom 8,000 are employed each season’.
the replanting of the douro’s vineyards following phylloxera provided permanent work
for the Galegos who were responsible for building many of the stone-walled terraces
(socalcos) that can be seen today. at the end of the nineteenth century, the Galegos
literally shaped the douro.- Brazil became an important market, importing as many as 20,000 pipes of wine a
year until the country was hit by a severe financial crisis in the mid-1920s.
The increase in turnover put a number of important shippers in a strong position when
it came to purchasing property in the Douro. Until this time, few shippers had owned
land but with the local economy in ruins, quintas changed hands at rock-bottom prices.
In 1890, W & J Graham bought Quinta dos Malvedos; Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman
purchased Quinta de Vargellas in 1893; in the same year Quinta da Eira Velha was
bought by Cabel Roope (Hunt, Roope, Teage & Co) and Robertson Bros. bought Quinta
do Roncão. One of the leading entrepreneurs of the era was George Acheson Warre, who
was then in charge of the winemaking at Silva & Cosens. Between 1887 and 1896 he
purchased three prime quintas starting with Quinta do Zimbro just upstream from Tua.
Warre began replanting and monitored the results. He records ‘...the ’88 planting to be
infected with phylloxera – badly – must replant. [American] vines good, but Portuguese
bad’. But by 1896 when grafting on to American rootstock had become accepted practice,
Warre wrote ‘this year’s wines are I consider better than any since 1878 and will, I hope
and believe, start a new era in the Port wine trade’. Warre’s most astute purchase was
undoubtedly Quinta do Bomfim close to Pinhão, which was developed with its own
railway siding to transport the wine downstream to Gaia.
By the turn of the century, the Douro valley was a hive of activity once more. Vieira da
Costa, writing in Uma Illustração Portuguesa in 1906, describes the Douro as ‘engaged in
an immense, indescribable, never before seen activity. Legions of workers, numbering in
the thousands, busy as ants, dug deep into the sterile womb of barren land ... life, in all
its potency and creativity began to emerge and bear new fruit, a new wealth’.