The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Presidential class all the way on the wine valley wonder
Fiona Duncan glides into a more elegant age on a rare outing to the Douro on Portugal’s most celebrated train
At 11 o’clock on a misty autumn morning, we gathered, a little nervously, on Platform One of Porto’s splendid São Bento Station, nodding politely to one another and wondering what the day would bring: we were to spend it riding on a train built in 1890 and never modernised. Every available seat was taken and many passengers had travelled to Porto especially for the prestigious vintage ride that slices deep into the Douro Valley before returning to São Bento in the evening. The trip takes place on only a few selected days in September and October each year and accommodates just 50 or so passengers.
The lavish beaux-arts station in the heart of Porto’s historic centre certainly makes a fitting launch pad, its walls plastered in blue and white azulejo tiles depicting dramatic scenes from Portugal’s history and of rural life.
You step back in time in the station and you stay back in time in the divine, diminutive Presidential Train. Built for King Luis I and lovingly restored in 2010, its home is Portugal’s National Railway Museum in Entroncamento, where it is the most prized exhibit. But for those precious few days a year, theatre and event impresario Gonçalo Castel-Branco has sweet-talked the museum into borrowing the train and working his magic inside it. And where better for a Portuguese Presidential train-turned-gourmet restaurant, its baggage car converted into a kitchen, to trundle on its narrow gauge track than into the heart of Portugal’s famous wine lands?
There’s something special about sitting sipping a series of the finest Portuguese wines while passing at a stately pace through the very hills from which they come. First we traversed the westernmost Baixo Corgo region, which mostly produces ports to be drunk young and has its share of ragged vineyards as well as well-tended ones. Its principal town, Régua, is also famous for something rather different: treacly boiled sweets. Elderly ladies dressed in smocks have noisily sold their home-made sweets from wicker baskets at Régua’s station since it was opened in 1879; for us, they came aboard and handed them out, since Gonçalo had already paid for everyone to have a bag.
As the hours drifted by and the great 560-mile river pushed on towards the border with Spain, so the hillsides all around it rose in scale, with no flat ground in sight and every creased and folded inch combed with millions of vines. Now we entered Cima Corgo, the Douro’s central region, where intermarried wine dynasties with their British roots and elegant quintas hold sway and their fat, lush vineyards are manicured to perfection.
The day wore on, with Gonçalo chatting knowledgably to passengers about wine, trains (his passion) and Portuguese history, and a hardworking team constantly having to flatten themselves against carriage walls as they balanced trays of wine and plates of food produced by top chefs toiling in the tiny, wobbly kitchen. Things got increasingly indulgent, bibulous and fun. In the dining rooms and the piano bar, formerly reserved for heads of state, we were constantly fed and entertained, first with a five-course lunch, and later tea, with scones freshly made on the train, a light supper, yet more wine, a pianist and a classical guitarist.
The seating at lunch, which lasts a couple of hours, is arranged at tables of four by Gonçalo’s team, who try to match like-minded passengers. When we were not in the dining room, our seats were in a private ministers’ compartment, with original drop-down ceramic basin and commode. Everything on the train is exactly as it was in 1890 – only the engine is newer, dating from the Sixties.
Back in the day, journalists accompanying heads of state – principally austere dictator Antonio Salazar – were assigned a special carriage at the back of the train, still known as the Journalists’ Carriage.
The train’s wine-tasting destination, before it turns around and heads back to Porto, is one of the finest dynastic wineries, Quinta do Vesuvio, not far from the wine town of Pinhão and its beautiful blue-tiled railway station. The lovely old quinta and its estate belong to the Symington family, who own, among other labels, Graham’s port and have been inextricably linked with the port business since 1888, when Andrew James Symington arrived from Scotland. Just like Gonçalo and his train, the down-toearth Symingtons understand that authenticity is a rare and valuable thing, and in the stone troughs at Vesuvio, the grapes are still trampled by foot, out of respect for the past.
The train that carried presidents, heads of state, popes, kings and queens (including our own) until the day in 1970 that it carried the coffin of Salazar and was retired from service, makes it possible to visit both Porto and the Douro Valley in one short break.
Our Porto base was The Yeatman, a luxurious, decade-old wine hotel in Vila Nova de Gaia, where venerable port lodges – Sandeman, Croft, Taylor’s, Offley, Graham’s and more – cluster close to the river. As the officers and merchants who settled after Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, liberated Porto in 1809 discovered, the city was perfectly placed for the transport of wine from the vineyards to the UK.
By now, unsurprisingly, we had developed a renewed taste for port and toured not one but two cellars: Taylor’s and Graham’s, which also both have excellent restaurants. Personally, I’m hooked on white port served with tonic water as an aperitif and tawny port served cold. And when I drink them at home, they take me straight back to a very old, very charming and very merry train.