Port anD the Douro uP to Date 9the First Port shiPPers
In the latter part of the seventeenth century the foundations were laid for some of the
great Port-shipping firms that continue to prosper today. One of the first English families
to be mentioned among those gathered at Viana and Oporto were the Newmans. Based
in the English West Country port of Dartmouth, they began trading in bacalhau in the
fifteenth century. By 1679 they had their own fleet of ships bartering Newfoundland cod
for Portuguese wine, which was found to have been greatly improved by the long sea voyage.
This suggests that their wine was already of considerably better quality than the light, run-
of-the-mill reds from the Minho which spoiled so readily. The Newmans’ wine-shipping
company went on to become Hunt Roope (subsequently bought by Ferreira) and the family
owned an important property in the Douro, Quinta da Eira Velha, until 2007.
The oldest Port shipper still trading today is the firm of C. N. Kopke & Ca Lda. This
was established in 1638 by Christian Kopke, son of the Lisbon consul for the Hanseatic
towns. Like many of these firms, Kopke began as a general merchant and only started
specialising in wine a century later. The English shipper with the longest continuous
lineage is the firm of Warre & Ca. founded in Viana do Castelo in 1670 (the Warre family
themselves joining nearly sixty years later). It was followed by Croft, established in 1678
under the name of its partners Phayre and Bradley, and Thomas Dawson who settled
in Oporto in 1680, whose firm subsequently became known as Quarles Harris. It was
around this time that the Oporto Customs first registered a shipment of wine from the
Douro as Vinho do Porto or ‘Port Wine’.
Portugal’s favoured status as a source for wine for the English was firmly established
by the Methuen Treaty of 1703. In an effort to deter Portugal’s brief flirtation with
France, Sir Paul Methuen (envoy to the King of Portugal 1697–1705 and Ambassador to
Portugal 1706–1708) concluded a military treaty in which England promised to defend
Portugal in the War of the Spanish Succession. In the meantime his father, diplomat
and cloth merchant John Methuen (Lord Chancellor of Ireland and envoy to Portugal
in 1691 and 1703, and Ambassador Extraordinary to Portugal in 1703), succeeded in
securing preferential treatment for English textiles in Portugal in return for a duty levied
on Portuguese wines that would be a third less than on those from France. Rather like
Cromwell’s treaty fifty years earlier, the Methuen Treaty proved to be a rather hollow deal
for the Portuguese. Wines from Portugal already enjoyed lower rates of duty in England
than those of any other country and the importation of French goods was in any case
severely restricted. Methuen’s provision for a preferential rate of duty did survive for over
150 years until it was finally dropped by Gladstone in 1866, and there can be no doubt
that the Treaty greatly advanced the Port trade.
The early years of this trade are well documented in the letters and diaries of Thomas
Woodmass, who arrived in the north of Portugal from England in 1703, the same year
as the Methuen Treaty was signed. He landed at Viana and met Job Bearsley, founder of
the firm that subsequently became Taylor, Fladgate and Yeatman. Woodmass was taken
to see the vineyards at ‘Monson’ (Monção) before making for Oporto. He wrote ‘O Porto