Port anD the Douro uP to Date 37Cinta, Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, Meda, Vila Nova de Foz Côa, São João de Pesqueira,
Tabuaço, Armamar and Lamego. Much of the territory included in the new demarcation
was at high altitudes with poor granite soils incapable of producing high quality wines.
The minimum alcoholic strength of Port wine was fixed at 16.5%.
The new demarcation provoked a barrage of complaints from the Port shippers but
much of João Franco’s legislation proved to be short lived. On 1 February 1908, as they
crossed the Terreiro do Paço in Lisbon in an open landau, the royal family was assailed
by a group of assassins. In the one and only regicide in Portugal’s history, Carlos I was
killed together with his eldest son, Prince Luís Filipe. The throne fell upon his second
son, Manuel (‘the unfortunate’), who at only eighteen years of age was in no position to
quell the troubles. The dictatorial and unpopular João Franco resigned from office and
the new government of Admiral Ferreira de Amaral decided to demarcate the Port wine
region parish by parish. The 1908 demarcation, much reduced in size, remains (with the
exception of minor alterations in 1921) the same to this day. But a succession of fractious
coalition governments were incapable of saving the monarchy. Two years later, in the face
of a naval revolt, Manuel II abdicated and left quietly for England. On 5 October 1910
Portugal became a republic.
the First rePuBliC anD the First
worlD war
The sixteen years of Portugal’s so-called ‘First Republic’ were some of the most turbulent in
the country’s history. Between 1910 and 1926 there were no less than forty-nine different
administrations with over sixty ministers of agriculture. Serious rioting broke out in Oporto
in 1910 and, concerned for their safety, the British residents requested naval protection
from the government in London. A ship duly arrived but, to everyone’s consternation, was
too large to cross the bar of the Douro.
Anti-clericism quickly took hold in Lisbon, alienating the deeply Catholic populace
in the north of the country. At Pinhão one of the main characters in the area was Abel
de Carvalho, an ardent monarchist and devout Catholic who managed Silva & Cosens’s
interests in the Douro. Seeing an anti-ecclesiastical protest in the village shortly after
the proclamation of the Republic, he walked over to one of the demonstrators who was
mocking a local saint and exclaimed ‘the only thing missing here is blood’ before rapping
him smartly on the head with a walking stick and marching off!
Uprisings, protests and bankruptcies occurred with bewildering frequency both at a
national level and in the Douro. Some shippers had to seek the protection of armed troops
after the story surfaced that they had been buying in cheaper wines from the south to
blend with Port. The regional commission created by João Franco to oversee viticulture in
the Douro was powerless to intervene. Legislation introduced to help farmers, including
the reorganisation of agricultural credit institutions to encourage the formation of co-
operatives, was unenforceable in the unstable political climate.