88 Port anD the Douro
armazém, providing simple accommodation for the caseiro (foreman) and his wife, who
are employed to run the quinta. However, the smallest properties have neither house nor
winery and the owner and his or her family will tend the vines from a nearby village. The
heady but often rank smell of fermenting grapes and young Port used to be all-pervading
in Douro villages at harvest time, but most of these small growers now sell their grapes
directly to a Port shipper or the local co-operative.
Many of the larger and more remote quintas are almost self-sustaining communities,
farming their own pigs and poultry, growing vegetables and supporting as many as three
or four families all the year round. Some have their own chapel adjacent to the house (as
at Quinta do Porto, Quinta do Seixo, Quinta do Zimbro) or out in the vineyard (Quinta
da Roêda, Quinta do Crasto, Quinta do Espinhal). Two outlying properties in the Douro
Superior, Quinta de Vargellas and Quinta do Vesúvio, are each of sufficient importance
to warrant their own railway station.
naPoleoniC laws anD
a ‘Berlin wall’
the fragmentation of landholdings in the douro is the consequence of Portugal’s
napoleonic laws of inheritance, whereby all offspring are entitled to inherit a share of the
family estate. in the relatively densely populated Baixo corgo there has been a greater
tendency to split vineyard holdings among families than in the more remote cima corgo
or the douro superior. as a result, some of the larger properties in the cima corgo may
have as many as fifty or sixty absentee shareholders, most of whom take absolutely no
part in the day-to-day running of the quinta but cause considerable problems when it
comes to taking strategic management decisions. this explains the run-down look of so
many houses in the douro and the number of abandoned properties. i once visited a
typically run-down quinta where a breeze-block wall had been built through the middle of
a once grandiose house to separate two factions of the same family.Depending on the time of year, Port quintas provide employment for an army of
labourers rising to thirty or forty people during the harvest. Like most armies, the Douro
marches on its stomach and the kitchen is the focus of the quinta. Usually the largest
room in the house, the cavernous Douro kitchen still has medieval appeal. Food in
the form of a hearty ‘all-in-one’ soup or stew is cooked in a huge black pot, which is
sometimes hoisted by means of a pulley or crane on to an open wood fire. There is a hole
in the roof for the smoke to escape. Children scream and squawk on the floor, especially
during the winter months when the kitchen is the only warm place to be. One of the few
modern concessions is the television, which has the capacity to bring this industrious
scene to a virtual standstill when the latest episode of a melodramatic Brazilian telenovela
(soap opera) starts.