Douro wines taste like they’re twice the price

Many years ago, Huyshe Bowyer collected me from the airport in Oporto and drove me for two hours up into the Douro Valley to Quinta da Vargellas at the centre of the vineyards belonging to Taylor, Fladgate and Yeatman — or Taylor’s Port, as it’s much better known. As an introduction to the world of port, I could not have had a better mentor or a better introduction to the region.

This was in the 1990s and the Douro was even more isolated and underdeveloped than it is now. Back then, the Douro, with its steep banks and terraced vineyards, was known almost solely for fortified wines, and Taylor’s made — and still make — what are arguably the greatest vintage ports, fabulously complex and long-lived. The sister house of Fonseca, to be fair, comes very close.

In the meantime, this classic Portuguese region has undergone quite a transformation. Less vintage port is made and much more non-fortified table wines. The Portuguese (as distinct from British) port house of Ferreira had pioneered this style with their Barca Velha — for long Portugal’s top table wine — back in 1952, but it didn’t exactly kick off a major trend. It was only after Portugal joined the EEC in 1986 that table wine production took off in the Douro, thanks largely to the port houses’ monopoly on grapes being broken.

But it took time. It’s a lot easier to produce huge, highly alcoholic wines with masses of extract in the hot, arid conditions of the Douro. Coaxing anything more delicate out of the local grapes, such as touriga nacional, touriga Francesa, tinto roriz and tinta barocca, requires a great deal of care and very skilled winemaking.

But now the table wines of the Douro have come of age and they range from youthful, exuberant but attractively solid reds like this week’s suggestion from Aldi, where it’s a top seller, to gloriously rich and complex, like the Avigados Reserva and Roquette e Cazes (with Lynch-Bages in its DNA, in a manner of speaking).

Portugal I believe — to an even greater extent than Spain — is the leading repository of great value in wine. Consider the two dearest wines I’m suggesting this week. I reckon if you were to find the same level of quality and attention to detail in something from, say, France or Italy, even Australia or South Africa, you would have to pay at least twice as much.