Port and the Douro (Infinite Ideas Classic Wine)

Port anD the Douro 63

Figure 1. Contrasting systems of cultivation in Douro vineyards

of 3,000–3,500 per hectare. Some of the oldest socalcos dating from the seventeenth century
still display pilheiros or boeiros: the regularly spaced square holes in the vertical walls from
which vines sprouted, thereby leaving the horizontal surface free for the cultivation of other
crops. When phylloxera swept through the region in the 1870s many of these terraces were