32 Port anD the Douro
American rootstock undoubtedly took place at Quinta de Val de Figueira near Covas in
1876 and four years later at Offley Forrester’s Quinta da Boa Vista. Following pressure
from both growers and shippers, the ban was lifted in 1883 and replanting began in
earnest. But even as late as 1896, in a detailed manual on viticulture in the Douro,
Villarinho de São Romão recommends flooding the vineyards as a means of asphyxiating
the phylloxera aphid.
For a time, phylloxera had a positive effect on sales of Port and Portuguese wine in
general. With France the first country to be affected, wine merchants in Great Britain
looked to Iberia to make up the shortfall. During the 1880s, when the damage was at its
greatest, exports of Portuguese wines rose sharply. France, which had barely registered as
a market for Portuguese wine in the 1860s, imported nearly a million hectolitres a year
between 1885 and 1889, at a time when the country’s total production struggled to reach
four million hectolitres. A large proportion of this wine was exported from Viana do
Castelo, briefly reviving a trade that had died when the English transferred their allegiance
to Oporto and the Douro two centuries earlier. In Oporto, a number of new firms were
in a good position to capitalise on the crisis in production, among them Wiese & Krohn,
Delaforce, Cálem and Ramos Pinto, all of which were established between 1859 and