48 Port anD the Douro
and driving a battered Alfa Romeo to one of the Biscay ports before journeying by sea to
England. Like many other leading Portuguese families, they re-emerged in Brazil, only
returning to Portugal in the 1980s. In the summer of 1975 it was rumoured that the
entire Port trade was on the point of being nationalised but the dismissal of the pro-
Communist Prime Minister, General Vasco Gonçalves, prevented the papers from being
signed; others say that the British Prime Minister, James Callaghan, intervened. There can
be little doubt that but for the strong foreign presence in Oporto, the Port trade would
have been nationalised.
In the midst of all this revolutionary fervour, a scandal broke which would have been
deeply damaging to the Port trade had the world not been more concerned about the
Portuguese political climate at the time. German authorities carrying out routine carbon-
dating tests found that the three previous vintages (1972, 1973 and 1974) had been fortified
with industrial alcohol instead of aguardente distilled from wine. At the time the Portuguese
government exercised a monopoly in the distribution of fortifying spirit through the Casa do
Douro. Eventually the fraud was traced back to an agent in France but, with the Portuguese
regime in turmoil, there was little that the shippers could do to claim recompense. Though
it was completely harmless, the Casa do Douro intervened and bought up large quantities
of spurious Port wine. For the following vintage, the Casa do Douro doubled the price of
aguardente from 11,000 escudos to 22,000 escudos a pipe.
During the autumn of 1975, a violent backlash took place in northern Portugal which
nearly paralysed the country. For a few weeks it seemed as though civil war might erupt
but, after another bid for power by the left-wing of the armed forces on 25 November
when guns were mounted on the Arrabida bridge between Oporto and Gaia, Portugal’s
political mainstream returned to power. The African colonies were now gone, and on 25
April 1976 the revolution ended peacefully with the first genuinely free elections for over
fifty years. Portugal emerged with a democratically elected Socialist government under
Prime Minister Dr Mario Soares. In 1977, seeking both political and economic stability,
his government took the first important step to becoming a member of the European
Union. Nearly forty years on, the revolution is now a fading memory for most people,
recorded in countless street names, ‘Rua 25 de Abril’ having been substituted for ‘Rua
Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’ throughout Portugal. As President of Portugal, in 1988
Mario Soares dined with the Port shippers at the Factory House, the first head of state to
do so since Manuel II visited Oporto in 1908.
all Change
Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Douro landscape changed more rapidly
than at any time since the phylloxera epidemic of the 1870s. Reflecting the Portuguese love of
acronyms, the first major development was the PDRITM (Projecto de Desenvolvimento Rural
Integrado de Trás-os-Montes) supported by the World Bank. Commonly known in English as
the ‘World Bank Scheme’, this ambitious project offered low-interest loans to farmers in one of