Portugal´s Douro valley: Port vineyard Quinta do Crasto takes on the brands
In the shrinking league-table of nations that still like and admire us British, Portugal easily comes top.
You feel it there wherever you go, from Lisbon to the Algarve - that special warmth and kindness towards 'ingleses' which even our worst holiday hooligans cannot destroy.
Militarily speaking, the Portuguese are Britain's oldest allies. Two hundred years ago, their support was crucial in the Duke of Wellington's campaign to expel Napoleon Bonaparte from the Iberian peninsula, so checkmating a European dictator whom some modern historians compare to Hitler. But Portugal's special relationship with Britain dates back still further, to the 17th and 18th Centuries, when a community of English and Scottish entrepreneurs settled in the northern city of Porto and began shipping home the fortified wine named after the town.
Port seems the most quintessentially British of tipples, for ever associated with red-faced old men in Pall Mall clubs ritualistically passing the decanter from right to left. Brands such as Taylor's, Croft's and Cockburn's are as deeply rooted in our gastronomic heritage as roast beef or stilton cheese.
Perhaps the most potent advertising symbol ever was the Sandeman company's 'don', in black cape and wide-brimmed sombrero, who for years loomed over the railway line into Waterloo station - for me, as a child, symbolising all the waiting excitements of London.
With this centuries-old British veneer, it's easy to forget that port comes from a country west of Spain, whose beautiful but mysterious language has few of the reassuring echoes of schoolroom French and Latin that Spanish does.
Port originates from the valley of the River Douro, a wild and mountainous region whose stunning loveliness has long been overlooked by most of Portugal's huge annual British influx. Ten years ago, it was hard to find even one modern hotel or first-class restaurant here. But now, belatedly, the Douro's beauty is beginning to be savoured along with its wine.
Connoisseurs of the Peninsular War and battlefield detectives will also find much to fascinate them. Two great Anglo-Portuguese victories over Napoleon were won in the area - at 'the bloodstained hill' of Bussaco and at Salamanca, over the Spanish border. Porto, with its enclave of English port barons, witnessed savage fighting to liberate it from Napoleon's greatest commander, Marshal Soult.
Major changes are afoot in the tradition-encrusted world of port - a name that, unlike sherry, has been fiercely protected against all foreign imitations since 1756.
Under recent legislation, local quintas, or vineyards, in the Douro have been allowed to compete with centuries-old British-created brands like Taylor's and Croft's. The region has also begun producing excellent table wines along with the 'fortified' (ie mixed with brandy) after-dinner kind.
I visited one of these upstarts, the Quinta Do Crasto, a three-hour drive from Porto, where vineyards seamed with olive trees carpet the sheer valley sides in neat geometric shapes up to the very peaks. Only in tropical paradises such as Bali does one normally see such landscaped mountains.
Crasto's managing director, Pedro Guedes de Almeida, is a slender, shy man whose family connections with port production date from 1615. He's also one of the so-called 'Douro Boys' - not an a cappella singing group but a quintet of new producers with firmly Portuguese names who are challenging the old British giants.
Pedro explained how the grapes are harvested from 95-year-old vines and taken to stone pits to be trodden by barefoot men as they used to be by the Romans. The port then spends only two years in cask before being bottled and left to age for decades, generations, even centuries. We had lunch on the quinta's terrace, high above the winding Douro, surrounded by vine-quilted mountains, with a pair of eagles swaying in stormy crosswinds overhead.
Afterwards, we tasted a Crasto 1995 late bottled vintage port - a younger one, poured straight from the bottle rather than decanted to remove sediment.
Beside me, Crasto's youthful enologo, or winemaker, Manuel Lobo de Vasconcellos, listed the different components in its flavour as 'cherry', 'honey' and 'cigar-box', like the bouquet from a cedar wood cabinet of hand-rolled Havanas.
Sipping the scrumptious stuff, I almost wished for a Churchill-size Romeo y Julieta cigar to puff along with it (plus, maybe, a starched shirt-front, a few medals and a cushion on which to rest my gouty foot.)
I stayed at the Aquapura, near Regua, a hotel and spa that eloquently proclaim the Douro's new dawn. 'We don't have anything else like it around here,' a local resident told me. 'In fact, we don't have anything like it in the whole of Portugal.'
Aquapura is a boutique hotel on a department-store scale, with what seem like hundreds of flickering candles, miles of dimly lit corridors, and washbasins that could water a whole squadron of Napoleonic cavalry.
In my duplex private villa, 23 vermilion wooden steps led from the bedroom up to a gigantic lounge. An equally expansive terrace gave on to a private swimming pool. Bathroom amenities included a chandelier like multiple stags' horns.
My bed was the most comfortable I've had in years, its supply of pillows the most absurdly generous. And, once again, the views of the Douro were stunning.
On my last day, I took the mountainous two-hour drive back to Porto (which for centuries the British called Oporto, unaware that the Portuguese prefix 'O' simply means 'the'). 'Port comes only from Portugal-runs the time-honoured slogan, but it does not actually come from Porto.
All the classic names in the world of port have their headquarters across the river in the suburb of Vila Nova da Gaia. The streets resemble continuous Napoleonic fortifications, picked out by oldfashioned, low-key logos for 'Dow's' or 'Graham's'.
The port bosses have their own social circle, revolving around an institution called the Factory Club whose exclusiveness gives Pall Mall a run for its money. Despite the centuries their ancestors have spent here, some still speak Portuguese with a defiantly British accent.
My host was Paul Symington, whose great-grandfather started work for Graham's in 1882 and whose family subsequently acquired that and a clutch of other historic brands, including Warre's and Quarles & Harris, together with 950 hectares of vineyards in the Douro.
Symington is passionately interested in the Peninsular War, particularly the exploits of William Warre, who chose a military rather than port-making career and showed extraordinary heroism in Porto's recapture from the French exactly two centuries ago. Sent with a few Portuguese civilians to deal with some alleged French 'stragglers', Warre found himself up against Marshal Soult's entire army.
On Symington's office mantelpiece stood ancient, smeary bottles dated 1918 and 1896. A few days earlier, he had opened two of Dow 1854, the same year as the Charge of the Light Brigade. One had turned to vinegar but the other was still perfect, 'dry and incredibly delicate'.
The recession is having its effect in Portugal, as everywhere, but, according to Symington, has not seriously damaged vintage port sales. The £40 price tag for a good bottle still compares favourably with £200-odd for a first-growth Burgundy. Besides, traditional customers such as Oxbridge colleges and London livery companies are thinking far ahead, to a time when today's financial woes will doubtless be long forgotten.
Nor is it just elderly British aristocrats who lay down port for their descendants. Sir Mick Jagger recently ordered a pipe (60 cases) of Dow 1977, the year of elvis Presley's death, as a gift to his actor son James.
It gives a whole new meaning to Ruby Tuesday.
Getting there
Abercrombie & Kent (08456 182213, www.abercrombiekent.co.uk) offers three-night deals at Aquapura from £773 based on two sharing a double room. It includes return flights with TAP from Heathrow and transfers.
