Port anD the Douro uP to Date 45Symington, ‘we began to realise that things were picking up when we sold more 1963
vintage Port than the 1896, making it the most successful declaration for over sixty years’.
Declarations in 1966 and 1970 were similarly well received. From around 280,000
hectolitres per annum at the start of the decade, total shipments increased to 350,000
hectolitres between 1965 and 1969, finally overtaking pre-war levels in the early 1970s.
Over the same period, the value of Port exports almost tripled as exports of wine in bottles
increased in share. Accounting for just 6 per cent of shipments at the start of the 1960s,
exports of bottled Port grew to 24 per cent by 1974. By 1970, most vintage Port was now
being bottled in Gaia and in 1973 a law was passed making it obligatory for all future
vintage declarations to be bottled at source.
Men who shaPeD the Douro
alistair Robertson, 1937–
alistair Robertson had to be persuaded to come to oporto in 1966. the Port trade was
at a low ebb and his aunt, Beryl yeatman, had recently been left with two Port houses,
taylor and Fonseca. she had two alternatives: bring in her nephew or sell up. alistair,
working in the brewing industry at the time, admits that he was reluctant to take it
on but finally agreed to ‘give it a go’. despite the company’s excellent reputation for
vintage Port, it was not selling enough wine to make a profit. alistair Robertson had the
idea for a new category of Port: wine from a single year or vintage, fined and filtered so
it could be drunk by the glass without decanting. taylor launched their 1965 LBV (late
bottled vintage) in 1970, accompanied by a letter to the wine trade signed by alistair.
it had a mixed reception to start with, one detractor saying ‘it will kill the Port trade,
but it will kill taylor first’. it did the opposite, and within a few years other shippers had
followed with their own LBVs; sales of LBV now add up to half a million cases a year.
alistair Robertson retired as Managing director of the Fladgate Partnership in 2000.FlooDing the Douro
The River Douro had long been an unpredictable torrent, prone to serious floods or cheias
in the winter months. One of the most devastating floods occurred in December 1909.
Ernest Cockburn records how the lodges close to the river in Vila Nova da Gaia were
completely flooded and steamers broke from their moorings such was the force of the
current. One much-loved steamer, the S.S. Douro, was swept out to sea and wrecked on
rocks near Leixões. When the cheia was at its height, it nearly covered the lower deck of
the two-tier bridge linking Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia, and at one stage it was feared
the entire structure might collapse. Conditions were no better in the Douro where pipes
of Port were washed downstream and out to sea, being found – sometimes still full of
wine – as far up the coast as Viana do Castelo. An entry in the visitors’ book at Quinta