Port

Kopke ships its first casks

Nicolau Kopke, a Hamburg merchant who served as Consul General of the Hanseatic League, shipped his first wine north from the Douro in 1638. His firm claims to be the oldest port house in the world, and it began as a merchant long before it owned vines.

An abbot pours for the EnglishLegend

The story is told that agents of a Liverpool merchant visited a monastery at Lamego in 1678. The abbot gave them a sweetish, smooth wine whose fermentation had been stopped with spirit. It is a founding tale of fortified wine, repeated by many writers, and not a documented invoice.

Taylor's opens in Gaia

Job Bearsley founded the house now known as Taylor's in Vila Nova de Gaia in 1692. It took the name Taylor, Fladgate and Yeatman in 1838, when three partners joined. The lodges across the river from Porto were already becoming the home of the trade.

The Methuen Treaty cuts the duty

England and Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty in 1703. It said Portuguese wine should never pay more than two thirds of the duty charged on French wine. With French wine penalised, English merchants turned to the Douro, and the trade grew quickly.

Pombal draws the first line

On 10 September 1756 the Marquis of Pombal demarcated the Douro vineyards and set rules for production, pricing and quality. A monopoly company was created to enforce them. Only wine from inside the line could be called Port, a very early example of a protected wine region.

The elder trees come out

Pombal's reforms included pulling up the elderberry trees inside the demarcated region. Fraudulent producers had used elderberry to darken thin wine and make it look richer. Removing the tree removed the shortcut, and stone markers, 335 in all, were set along the boundary.

The vineyards are classified

In 1757 the first full classification of Port vineyards was completed under the new company. Estates were graded by quality, a system that points forward to every vineyard ranking since. The Douro was already being treated as a place with a ladder of better and lesser land.

England drinks its fill

By 1799 English imports of port reached about 44 million litres, which works out to roughly five litres for every English citizen. A fortified wine from steep terraces had become a standard item on the English sideboard, and the lodges of Gaia were busy.

Forrester prints his pamphlet

In 1844 Joseph James Forrester, a young English wine man who had come to Portugal in 1831, published an anonymous pamphlet called A Word or Two on Port Wine. It attacked abuses of the trade, and 102 parishes of the upper Douro backed his campaign.

A map of the river

Forrester's detailed map of the Douro appeared in 1848, and the Portuguese government adopted it as a national work. He also mapped the port region and its estates. Before roads and rails, a good chart of the river was as valuable as a good cask.

A baron for the river

King Ferdinand II named Forrester Baron de Forrester in 1855, the same year he won a silver medal of the first class at the Paris Universal Exhibition. An English wine merchant was now a Portuguese noble, and the river had its advocate.

Forrester drowns in the rapids

Forrester died on 12 May 1861 when his boat capsized in the Douro rapids. He is remembered in the valley as the protector of the Douro. The river he had charted took him, and that is the plain end of the story.

The monopoly company is stripped of its privileges

In 1863 the old monopoly company lost its privileges and became an ordinary commercial firm, following the liberalisation of trade. A century of controlled prices and fixed quotas ended, and the Douro entered a freer and rougher market, with merchants bargaining for grapes that the company had once priced by decree.

Phylloxera reaches the Douro

The vine louse Phylloxera vastatrix is believed to have reached the Douro in 1868, striking the eastern vineyards that made the finest port. By 1872 it had brought many famous estates to their knees. Roots deformed, yields fell and prices rose.

John Fladgate goes to France

John Fladgate, a Taylor's partner, travelled to France to study remedies for phylloxera and published his findings in 1872 to help local farmers. The eventual cure was to graft European vines onto American rootstock. Abandoned terraces called mortórios still mark the estates that could not afford to replant.

A new demarcation

A new phase of demarcation began in 1907 as protective policies returned. It reshaped the Douro region as it is known now. The line of 1756 had set the idea, and the line of the early twentieth century fitted it to a landscape changed by plague and replanting.

The Port Wine Institute is founded

The Instituto do Vinho do Porto was created in 1933, after the Casa do Douro and the exporters' guild had been set up in the year before. It became Port's certifying body and issued numbered seals for bottle necks. In 2007 it was renamed to cover Douro table wines too.

The dams end the rabelo boats

Barcos rabelos, the flat bottomed boats that carried casks from the vineyards down to the Gaia lodges, stopped working the river after hydroelectric dams were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Tankers and roads took over, and the boats now survive as heritage craft.

The Alto Douro becomes a World Heritage Site

UNESCO inscribed the Alto Douro wine region as a World Heritage Site in 2001. The listing recognises the terraced slopes, the schist soils and a landscape cut by hand over centuries. It is a place where the wine and the hillside cannot be separated.

South Africa keeps style words, adds Cape

In March 2006 the European Union again allowed South African producers to use style words such as vintage, ruby and tawny. In exchange, export labels must carry the word Cape, and the word port itself was ruled out. Port is a protected name in Europe.

Australia gives up the word Port

A wine agreement published in September 2010 banned Australian producers from using Champagne, Port and Sherry on labels in the European Union. Winemakers were given a year to phase out the names. Australian fortifieds in the tawny style had to find other words.

White port and tonic takes off in London

In July 2018 the trade press reported that UK sales of white port had risen by 70 percent since December 2017. The surge followed the white port and tonic trend, pitched as a Portuguese answer to the Aperol Spritz and poured in bars from the Savoy to Soho.