36 Port anD the Douro
Plague anD PolitiCs
The turn of the century was a particularly turbulent time for Portugal. An outstandingly
good and well-received vintage in 1896 declared by the majority of shippers came to be
viewed in retrospect as the calm before the storm. The first calamity hit in August 1899
when cholera broke out, there having been previous scares in 1892 and 1884. A ‘sanitary
cordon’ was imposed on Oporto, restricting the movement of the city’s inhabitants. As
vintage approached, the Port shippers appealed through the British Consul for the right to
visit their properties and growers in the Douro. The Minister for Foreign Affairs in Lisbon
replied that ‘he could not consider such a question’ and that ‘as no exceptions were allowed
in the case of the native Portuguese, they could grant no favours to foreigners’. Writing in
Port Wine and Oporto (published in 1949), Ernest Cockburn argues that the regulations
were both ‘unreasonable’ and ‘absurd’, but with the Port shippers effectively imprisoned in
Oporto, the vintage took place without them.
In the meantime, Portuguese politics were once more in ferment. Throughout the
latter years of the nineteenth century, republicanism had been gaining momentum,
encouraged by the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy in 1889. In the Oporto military
garrison feelings ran high enough for a republican revolution to be attempted two years
later. It brought an end to over half a century of settled politics. In 1907 the beleaguered
Portuguese king Carlos I reacted to the growing political upheaval by appointing João
Franco as Prime Minister and effective dictator.
The same year saw the loss of the lucrative Russian market which had favoured sweet
white Ports. In an effort to boost sales of their own wines, the Russian authorities raised
the duty on Port to the equivalent of £60 a pipe. Shipments had fallen sharply in the early
1900s as other wine-producing nations recovered from phylloxera, and with stocks piling
up in their lodges the shippers themselves has no need to buy wines from growers in the
Douro. Tobacco became an important crop in the Douro with 207 hectares in cultivation
by 1907, concentrated especially around the towns of Armamar and Santa Marta de
Penaguião. There were also legitimate concerns about the amount of so-called ‘Port’
reaching the market from regions other than the Douro. Californian ‘Port’, Tarragona
‘Port’ and Australian ‘Port’, some bearing the Portuguese coat of arms, were also being
sold alongside wines from southern Portugal masquerading as Port.
João Franco responded to the growing crisis in the Douro by enacting new protectionist
legislation. In an attempt to control exports and stamp out fraud, the government
stipulated that any wine with the right to the name ‘Port’ must be shipped either across
the bar of the Douro river or from the new port of Leixões. But as a sop to the growers in
southern Portugal who had the most to lose from this, the new regulations prohibited the
distillation of wine from the Douro. In future nearly all the aguardente used to fortify Port
wine would originate from outside the region. Franco also extended the Port demarcation
as far as the border with Spain. It included the entirety of the municipalities of Mesão Frio,
Régua, Sta Marta de Penaguião, Vila Real, Valpaços, Murça, Sabrosa, Alijó, Carrazeda de
Ansiaes, Vila Flor, Mirandela, Alfandega da Fé, Torre de Moncorvo, Freixo Espada-á-