76 Port anD the Douro
some of the grapes that have largely been ignored since the 1980s, and includes Sousão,
Touriga Femea and Donzelinho among the reds, as well as white varieties like Viosinho,
Gouveio and Rabigato. An organisation called PORVID, supported by the major Port
shippers, has been formed to study and preserve Portugal’s indigenous grape varieties.
Symington’s have two hectares of fifty different varieties at Vilariça in the Douro Superior,
and there are a further 250 varieties with multiple clones planted at Pegões near Setúbal
in the south of Portugal.
There are over a hundred different red and white grape varieties sanctioned for planting
in the Douro, twenty-nine of which are ‘recommended’ as opposed to the remainder
which are merely ‘authorised’. There are nearly as many white varieties as red, although
most of the attention over the past thirty years has focused on the ‘famous five’ to the
exclusion of other potentially interesting grapes. Until recently there were a number of
inconsistencies in the official list of varieties including a large number of synonyms for
the same grape. During the 1990s and 2000s, the Instituto da Vinha e do Vinho (IVV) in
Lisbon has made useful progress in the naming of individual grape varieties. In accordance
with the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature and the International Code of
Cultivated Plants, they have drawn up a list of all the grape varieties growing in Portugal
(over three hundred in total), the majority of which are indigenous. The IVV’s list goes
a long way towards sorting out the age-old problem of regional synonyms. It identifies
a principal name for each variety along with an officially recognised synonym where
appropriate. Other local synonyms are also listed and although they continue to be used
in the day-to-day lexicon, these names are no longer authorised for use on labels. One
or two principal names have been altered – for example, the Douro’s single most planted
variety, Touriga Francesa, is now known officially as Touriga Franca.
Apart from the famous five which have been batch planted since the early 1980s, many
Douro varieties are still something of an unknown. White grapes, in particular, have
been largely ignored and still tend to be found in older vineyards interplanted among
red varieties. For this reason many of the profiles below are still necessarily based on
observation rather than on co-ordinated scientific research.
The following grape varieties are listed in order of their relative importance in the vineyard.
A full list of ‘recommended’ and ‘authorised’ varieties may be found in Appendix III.
reD graPe varieties
touriga Franca (touriga Francesa)
Neither franca (‘true’) nor ‘French’, Touriga Franca is much the most widely planted
variety in the Douro accounting for around 22 per cent of the total vineyard area and
as much as 29 per cent in the Baixo Corgo. Touriga Franca is a relatively new grape, the
result of an accidental crossing of Touriga Nacional with Mourisco (q.v.) probably at the
time of phylloxera. The name Touriga Francesa (the antecedent to Touriga Franca) was
only adopted in the 1940s. Prior to that it was probably the same variety as one known