Wine and food
Port for the storms
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The drive from Oporto up the Douro valley is disagreeable, even in a comfortable car, even today. The road is narrow and serpentine. Until this century there was no road at all, until the end of the last century no railway. Only the Portuguese and the English, one is inclined to think, two eccentric and speculative peoples, could have created a great wine amid such unpropitious surroundings. Apart from the problems of transport — and before the railway and the road, bringing the wine down by river on the spring flood was an annual adventure — the upper Douro is wild, beautiful country, which has been cultivated slowly: even today only ten per cent of the land area in the official port-growing territory is under vines.
What makes the voyage worth-while, what makes the wine, is the upper Douro valley itself, geologically and climatically unique. Of the several Portuguese valleys that run west into the Atlantic, it is the only one which is alluvial in origin. The resultant soil — 'schist' — is very fine and peculiarly rich. Along with a unique micro-climate in summer, with a prevailing easterly wind off the Spanish plains the temperature in the upper valley reaches 1100 — it produces the grapes and the wine. The delicious table wine of the region is unmistakeably the basis of port, even young and unfortified: dark, sweet, strong. It becomes what we know as port fifty miles away on the mouth of the river, in Oporto, the delightful town which gives it's name to both the country and the wine.
On the south bank of the river the wine is 'stored, blended, eventually bottled and shipped. There is a plan to move the whole industry from Oporto to the vineyard area itself, an idea silly even by the standards of Latin left-wing governments. Most people in the port trade are con I idc n t that if they sit it out the plan will go away. The trade has enough problems to worry about as it is. The chief of these, in common with other branches of the wine trade, has been the task of recovering from the recession of 1973-4 when sales, which had been rising steadily, collapsed. There has been a slow come-back through 1975 to this year but recovery is not yet complete. This is in part because the slump coincided with a major attempt at speculation which hit the port shippers badly. With port as with champagne, those who grow the grapes 'are different from those who make the wine. For example, Sandemans, whose guest I was during this year's vintage, buy grapes or new wine off as many as 8000 growers, small peasant farmers (who explain incidentally why northern Portugal is politically conservative: the Left stronghold is among the landless labourers on the southern latifundia). In 1973 a gang, some of them local farmers, successfully cornered the market, buying and holding nearly 30,000 pipes of wine, more than three million gallons, a large proportion of output. The minimum selling price from grower to buyer is established legally and announced not long before the vintage. In 1973 an increase of fifty per cent over the previous year's prices were announced; many shippers found that they had to pay 150 per cent more.
On top of all this there was the even more unpleasant episode of C14. Port is fortified: the initial fermentation of the wine is stopped after a few days by the addition of spirit in the proportion of 100 pipes to 450 pipes of wine. This spirit should be brandy made from the wine of the region. Breaches of this rule have always been winked at: any Portuguese brandy would do, and sometimes the equivalent of marc rather than brandy. The spirit is supplied under the auspices of the governemnt. Three years back shippers discovered to their horror that from 1972 to 1974 very large quantities of synthetic alchohol — `C 14' — imported from Eastern Eat-we had been used in the making of port. They had acted in good faith and their blenders' skill has repaired much of the damage. Those responsible for the scandal have gone unpunished so far, and knowing Portugal that's how it will stay.
What port should one drink? Again the analogy with champagne is close. The great quantity of port made is blende41 not eillY from the wines of several areas of several different years. The blender's skill is to produce a consistent result. One ruby which I watched being blended contained eleven different wines, the oldest a 1944, the youngest a '74. The same brand last year might have been made with an entirely different collection of wines: they come together to produce the same result. It maY be necessary to add something special to the blend so that an ordinary bottle of wood port might contain a fraction of very old and rare wine.
The essential difference between rubY and tawny, the two species of wood port, Is that tawny spends longer in cask Where It loses its colour and where a 'wood' flavour subdues the fruit. If you like a rich, fruity wine then ruby is the one; tawny is drier and softer. Neither, if a simple wine, should cost more than £3 a bottle: the Wine Society does perfectly good wood ports at £2.12. Of course, you get what you pay for: superior blends cost more. A good exaMple of a superior tawny is Harvey's Directors' Bin. Compared with these, vintage port is of course dear. It is only of slight importance for the port trade as a whole: scarcely five per cent of all port becomes vintage wine, It is a peculiarly English taste: Great Britain takes nine bottles out of ten of yin' tage whereas with the global export of all kinds of port, France is by far the biggest customer: 33.7 per cent of port sold by volume compared to the UK's 15.3 per cent and a domestic Portuguese sale of 13.3 Per cent. The standard of quality control with vintage remains remarkably high, as Is demonstrated by the very fact that a vintage is more often not 'declared'; the decision' taken two years after the wine is first rnade by individual shippers, sometimes a few of them, sometimes most or all. That rigorous standards are applied can be judged from the fact that there was, for example, 00 vintage declared between 1970 and 1975. The vintages for drinking no* are 1960 and, just, 1962. Sandeman's 1960 seemed to me particularly fine ( I was, admittedlY, influenced by the fact that I drank a gratlfY," ingly large quantity of it in Portugal) an', will certainly last for some time. Of others have recently drunk. Berry Bros's 1962 was very pleasing, though a little pricey at £6.10. The Wine Society currently list five Vintage ports, including a 1955 Croft at £8.50. The words 'good value' for this wine Come uneasily from one who can remember drinking at Oxford, only ten years ago, Quinta do Noval '47 at 21s 6d (for those Who remember what that means) the bottle; but good value is what it is.
Of more recent vintages the 1970s are sure to be outstanding. Not many people nowadays are in a position to consider laying down wine for consumption a decade hence. At more than £5 a bottle even the institutional buyers — clubs and colleges — Which used to be the mainstay of the trade are cutting back their orders. It is a nice question of inflation accounting, though. Nothing is certain in this world, but fine Wines are at least as likely to keep an increase their value in real terms as equities. And there is the ultimate hedge that even if they do not do well as a speculation, a few bottles of 1970 port will provide a muchneeded anaesthetic in 1984.
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