42 Port anD the Douro
which was still trading at pre-war prices, had a dampening effect on their pricing. Most
British wine merchants were not interested in using up their valuable import quotas with
vintage Port, so the shippers bottled the 1945s themselves and held the wine until the good
times returned. A disparaging story was put about by the English wine trade that the corks
used for the Oporto bottlings were of poor quality. This story was without foundation, as I
found in 1998 when I had the opportunity to compare the London and Oporto bottlings
of Dow’s 1945 vintage Port side by side. Due to the post-war glass shortage, much of the
latter was bottled in brown sherry bottles.
At this time just 2 per cent of all Port was bottled in Oporto. The remainder continued
to be shipped in cask and bottled at its destination, either accompanied by appropriate
labels from the shipper or under the merchant’s own name. The creative marketing and
public relations that has done so much to promote Port brands in the 1980s and 1990s
was almost non-existent. When Sandeman advertised their brand on London buses before
the war, Walter Berry, a partner in the famous firm of Berry Bros. & Rudd, described
their wine disparagingly as ‘omnibus Port’! But in the post-war period the Port trade sank
so low that there was no money for promotion.
war anD rosé
Port shipments fell to the lowest level ever recorded in 1942 with just 11,000 pipes
shipped abroad. there was a huge surplus of grapes in the douro and the growers were
desperate. sensing a commercial opportunity, an employee of Port shippers Martinez
Gassiot, Fernando van Zeller Guedes, joined up with a group of oporto businessmen
to establish a new company with the aim of exporting wine to Brazil. during the 1942
vintage, Guedes bought over a thousand pipes of wine from douro farmers. in a letter
to his brother written that october Guedes states that ‘the firm has been launched in
the region ... the farmers speak well of us, even very well, especially those who do not
hide their satisfaction at having done business with us’. it was whilst travelling in the
douro that Guedes had a brainwave:‘I went through the Douro on a scruffy little donkey, or walking the entire day long. You hadn’t
time to have a bath, assuming it was possible to have a bath, and you went straight to bed
when you arrived at the hotel. During the night at this particular establishment I was woken
by bed bugs, and I had to get out of bed and sit on a stool in the room. Having been awakened,
I had to do something so I looked at the notes I had made during the day setting out my ideas
for the present and the future. I was always making notes and thinking about brands...’and in June 1943 the new company launched its first brands: a Vinho Verde named
cambriz, red and white douro wines named Granado and Vila Real – and a fizzy rosé
named Mateus. the company, subsequently named sogrape, became the largest wine
producer in Portugal, buying up Port shippers Ferreira in 1987 and sandeman in 2002.