44 Port anD the Douro
fell over each other trying to acquire stocks before the law came into force just a year later,
stretching themselves further just to stay in business. Some sold quintas in order to survive;
others folded or merged.
Of the eighty-three registered shippers in existence at the end of the war, there
were around fifty remaining in 1970, many of which had either been taken over by
multinationals (Croft, Delaforce, Cockburn and Sandeman) or amalgamated into private
groups. By the early 1970s, the only British shippers remaining in private family hands
were Taylor/Fonseca and the Symington-owned houses of Dow, Graham, Warre, Quarles
Harris, Gould Campbell and Smith Woodhouse. One small independent shipper always
kept on good terms with Royal Oporto as they assumed that they would be taken over
by them at some stage.
not-so-swinging sixties
Flower power, miniskirts, rock music and all the other cultural icons of the 1960s virtually
bypassed Portugal, which was still kept on a tight leash by the elderly and idiosyncratic
Salazar. But however much he protected the country from the outside world, Portugal was
forced to change. In 1961 a guerrilla war began in Angola and rapidly spread to the other
colonies in Africa. As the young and able-bodied left Portugal, either to fight in the wars or
emigrating to escape military service, the country suffered an increasingly debilitating drain
of its resources. Over a million people emigrated – mainly to France and Germany – between
1960 and 1970, with the rural districts of Vila Real, Viseu and Bragança (corresponding
with the Douro) registering the highest rates of depopulation. It is estimated that the region
lost 20 per cent of its population in ten years. Thousands of small farms were abandoned,
and whole villages left virtually deserted with only a few elderly crones in charge.
In these circumstances, the traditional lagares, which required between one and two
people per pipe (a total of twenty to thirty men) in order to tread the grapes effectively, were
no longer viable and it fell to the shippers to come up with alternatives. Some adopted the
so-called movimosto (see p. 132), an ill-fated adaptation of the traditional lagares, whilst
others built huge centralised wineries equipped with autovinification tanks (see Chapter
3). Although electricity had reached Pinhão in the mid-1930s, supply remained erratic
and many outlying properties were still without power. Conventional extraction methods
like pumping over with electric pumps (remontagem) were not a viable alternative.
In the Douro, as in other Portuguese wine regions, Salazar promoted the formation of
centralised co-operative wineries. The first of these was established at Mesão Frio in 1950
and a total of twenty-two were built over the following sixteen years. The co-ops were set
up to attract small farmers in the Baixo Corgo and on the higher margins of the region.
By the early 1990s they registered nearly 13,000 members, just short of half the total
number of growers in the Douro. The largest co-operative at Santa Marta de Penaguião
has 2,000 members, 85 per cent of whom tend less than a hectare of vineyard.
During the 1960s the Port trade began to see signs of recovery. The outstanding
1963 vintage (declared in 1965) was well received by the trade. According to Michael