18 Port anD the Douro
wine from 1765 was sold. Both these years were certainly well regarded, for Vila Real
magistrate, Bernardo José de Sousa Guerra, wrote that the wines of 1775 ‘are strong,
rich and full, similar to those of the year 1765, whose great and memorable goodness has
met with the general approval of intelligent people’. Certainly by the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the Douro could boast a number of fine vintages. Sandeman claim
to have produced their first vintage Port in 1790 and George Sandeman, dining with the
Duke of Wellington at Torres Vedras in 1809, declared the 1797 to be ‘the finest Port
year within his experience’. It was not until 1810 that the first shipper’s name – Croft –
appeared in a Christie’s catalogue.
These early wines were clearly nothing like today’s vintage Port. They were certainly
lighter in style and probably aged for longer in cask before being shipped and bottled,
being more akin to colheitas than the vintage Ports of today. According to T. G. Shaw,
who wrote Wine, the Cellar and the Vine, published in 1863, it was common for the wines
to be ‘fined and racked a number of times before bottling, a process which would have
stripped the young Port of much of its body and character’. The first vintage about which
there is any real certainty is the so-called `Waterloo Vintage’ of 1815, and it is apparent
that by 1820 vintage Port was eagerly sought by the British wine trade. Contemporary
advertisements from the London wine auctioneers Christie’s indicate that the 1820 Ports
were bottled three and five years after the vintage, and T. G. Shaw describes a wine from
the same year as having ‘plenty of crust and plenty of colour’. It seems likely that most of
these wines were, in effect, single-quinta Ports sourced by shippers from individual estates
and bottled bearing the name of a British wine merchant. The brand names of individual
shippers only became prominent towards the end of the nineteenth century.
the British Colony anD the
FaCtory house
By the 1790s Port shipments to England alone had increased to 55,000 pipes, and the British
merchants could afford to live ‘much better than the same persons would do in London’,
according to one visitor. In complete contrast to Thomas Woodmass, who described the
privations of the English and Scottish eighty years earlier, Captain Costigan writes in 1778
of a civilised lifestyle of dancing, hearty eating and drinking, and playing at cards. He goes
on to say that they ‘are certainly no great attraction to the generality of Englishmen; neither
have they time, even if they had any inclination, to study the country they live in’. The
British families in Oporto intermarried with each other, keeping their distance from the
Catholic fidalgos or Portuguese nobility. Such was their isolation from the local population
that by all accounts the British merchants spoke the most execrable Portuguese. Portuguese
is not an easy language to master, but the Anglicised pronunciation of some British shippers
is still a matter for mirth and mimicry two centuries later!
There was a certain amount of migration in the opposite direction. According to
Charles Sellers, writing in Oporto Old and New, there was at the time a Portuguese