|
Portugal's Douro Valley has long been defined by its most famous export, but the region's top producers are now making table wines of real character and charm, writes Jonathan Ray
Portugal's Douro Valley has long been defined by its most famous export, but the region's top producers are now making table wines of real character and charm, writes Jonathan Ray
The Douro Valley in northern Portugal is one of the oldest wine-producing areas. Bizarrely, it is also one of the newest.
Long famous for its port (it was the first wine region in the world to be officially demarcated in 1756), the Douro is fast gaining a formidable reputation for its new-wave table wines. We seem to have a taste for them here: sales in the UK have risen 43 per cent in the past year.
Beautiful yet forbidding, the Douro is bitingly cold in winter and savagely hot in summer. The haphazardly terraced slopes that plunge down to the edge of the Douro River support 40,000 hectares (nearly 100,000 acres) of stony vineyards - often blasted out of the rock by dynamite - that are costly and difficult to work. It is amazing that they manage to make wine at all.
But make wine they do, and it is boom-time, with long-established port producers and new kids on the block falling over themselves to make table wines of real character.
It seems curious that after centuries of making port, it's only just occurred to them to make unfortified wine, so I head to the Douro to find out more.
"But we always did make wine," says João Nicolau de Almeida, managing director of port producer Ramos Pinto, one of the first to produce and market the new table wines. "We're just looking for something that we lost.
"It was the British who started fortifying our wines with brandy - so that they would survive the voyage home - and so that's how we made them. We're simply waking from a long sleep and rediscovering our past."
Established port houses such as Quinta do Noval, Quinta de la Rosa, Real Companhia Velha and the Symington Family Estates are all now marketing excellent table wines alongside their tawny and vintage ports. Of the big names, only the Fladgate Partnership remains aloof, preferring to concentrate on port.
Newer estates are getting in on the act, with growers banding together in co-operatives such as Lavradores de Feitoria or loose coalitions such as the charismatic young(ish) winemaking quintet from Quinta do Vale Meão, Quinta do Crasto, Quinta Vale Dona Maria, Quinta do Vallado and Niepoort, known collectively as the Douro Boys.
"This is not Portugal any more, this is the Douro," says Miguel Roquette from Crasto. "There is still plenty of vile muck made in the rest of the country, but here we're on to something big. We have unique grape varieties from old vines backed by centuries of experience. Yet we're still a young region."
I spend three days tasting my way up and down the valley and can't help but notice a definite buzz of excitement in the air ("It's so exhilarating, like the first weeks of an affair with a new girlfriend," says João Ferreira Alvares Ribeiro of Vallado).
And the wines I try are, in the main, very, very good. Reds dominate, ranging from big, tannic, darkly brooding examples to those that are silky and supple and crammed with brambly fruit.
Although some are so-called field blends, made from unidentifiable grape varieties harvested from whatever hotchpotch was originally planted, most are blended from the "recommended" five varieties that are used for making port: Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo), Tinta Barroca and Tinta Cão.
The fresh yet rounded whites are from Verdelho and other varieties I had never heard of, such as Rabiagato, Codega and Viozinho.
"The Douro gives you everything," says Niepoort's Luis Seabra.
"No other region in the world has so many varieties. Where else would a winemaker be unashamed to say he's no idea what grapes are in his blend?"
This revolution in the Douro has happened swiftly. The new generation of winemakers travelled to the rest of Europe and beyond to study, while winemaking courses at nearby Vila Real's university have offered a more scientific approach than the father-to-son methods of old.
In addition, winemakers are more hands-on, living in the Douro rather than 150 miles away in Porto, as did the port shippers of old.
"There's still a lot of spadework to be done," cautions Charles Symington. "We're spoilt with our red varieties, but little is known about many of them, and we're learning all the time. They can be brutal and tannic, and the trick is to tame them and give them a creamy velvetiness without losing the integral structure."
The Douro's wines represent exceptional value. They burst with character, intensity and freshness. Most of the varieties are unique (Sandra Tavares da Silva from Quinta Vale Dona Maria says one of her wines contains 41 different varieties) and ideal for those who subscribe to the Anything But Cabernet fraternity.
"We had a priceless treasure under our noses and only just realised it," says Pedro Mansilha Branco of Quinta do Portal.
"It's astounding that it has taken us so long, but we all believe we have a golden opportunity with everything in place to make great wines that nobody can replicate, any more than they can replicate our ports." Not for nothing is the area called the Valley of Gold |
English