2. Vineyards, vines and quintas
‘Minha terra’
It is all too easy to be possessive about the Douro. Deep valleys, tiny villages and remote
quintas engender a strong sense of place among those who live and work there. Ask someone
where they come from and they will tell you, with great pride, the name of the povoação or
hamlet where their family live. This, they will state emphatically, is ‘minha terra’ (my land).
Centuries of isolation have bred a strong spirit of individuality and self-sufficiency in the
people of the Douro. Emotions run deep and, occasionally, so does conflict. Disagreements
between parties sometimes fester for generations.
The Douro means different things to different people. Gazing up his pyramid of
terraces, a vineyard owner proudly explained to me that it was the ‘eighth wonder of the
world’. A growing number of foreign tourists have come to see it in the same light. To the
Port shipper who alludes to the Douro as ‘our river’, the region is primarily a place to do
business. At certain times of the year when riverboats, speedboats and water skiers ply the
water, the river can be something of a playground. But for most of the 35,000 growers
who tend the region’s tiny plots of vineyard, daily life in the Douro is plain hard graft.
roCk anD a harD PlaCe
It is hard to imagine a more challenging place in which to grow grapes and, at first sight, even
harder to conceive how the banks of the Douro ever came to be planted with vineyards. Part
of the explanation can be found in the underlying geology. The bedrock beneath the greater
part of northern Portugal is the grey Hercynian and pre-Hercynian granite that can be seen
in the gaunt civic buildings of central Oporto. Rarely very far from the surface, this hard
rock frequently penetrates through the poor, thin quartzite soils, making much of the land