HISTORY BY THE GLASS
PINHAO, Portugal — Ribbons of bright-green grape leaves alternated with golden stone walls as far as I could see along the steep banks of Portugal’s Douro River.
Cantilevered steps led up handstacked dry stone walls to narrow ledges, where the schist rock had been crumbled, also by hand, to make the soil. The terraces, planted with rows of vines, basked in the early-summer sunshine.
Tony Smith was showing me around his Quinta da Boa Vista estate outside the winemaking town of Pinhao, with 26 miles of walls, some 30 feet tall, supporting vines at least 80 years old.
“Vines thrive when they suffer a bit,” he said.
No kidding. These mountain-hugging terraced vineyards produce one of the
most recognizable wines in the world and the most visible export of this economically struggling country: Port, or vinho do Porto in Portuguese, from its namesake harbor city at the Douro’s estuary, 80 miles downriver from Pinhao.
In June, on my fourth trip to the region, I explored the Port cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia (often simply called Gaia), the city on the opposite riverbank from Porto, and then drove up the Douro to visit three vineyards near the towns of Baiao and Pinhao.
Holding a glass of 20-year-old tawny Port at the Ramos Pinto lodge in Gaia, the house head winemaker and general manager Joao Nicolau de Almeida smiled at the dark amber swirls.
“The most humanized wine,” he called it, because, from stone-breaking to the constantly changing blends over years, it’s “people’s work, not just nature’s.”
Tawny was de Almeida’s first wine — at age 6 at his parents’ dinner table — and first school-break job, when his father sent him to work in the family warehouses as punishment for bad grades. Over the past 30 years, de Almeida has been a leader in studying and modernizing Douro winemaking.
The story of Port, just like the resilient Douro grapes of which it’s a blend, continues to be one of human creativity.
“Port-tonic?” a waiter offered as I sailed the Douro between the monument-crammed historic center of Porto and the wine cellars directly across the river in Gaia during the St. John’s Day regatta of rabelos, the traditional boats that were used to transport wine barrels.
The trendy cocktail, made with white Port, seeks to attract younger drinkers, said Rui Cunha, a Porto-based winemaker and great-grandson of Adriano Ramos Pinto, the house founder.
Already in the late 19th century, he commissioned risque Art Nouveau advertisements of Port as “a temptation,” including a glass-holding snake slithering up Eve as Adam watches. The ads are on view at the company’s museum.
But for all its indulgent luxury reputation, Port has origins that are backbreakingly earthy, stemming from rocky, steep terroir that couldn’t be more different from the gently rolling hills of Bourgogne, Chianti and Napa.
Because vines need little water and can grow where little else will, Romans and then 12th-century Cistercian monks cultivated them along the upper Douro, which flows to the Atlantic from northern Spain (where, called Duero, it also waters celebrated vineyards).
In the 1600s, English traders deprived of French wines turned to Portuguese producers, and, one story goes, added brandy to the full-bodied reds to preserve them on their sea voyage — making Port.
By the mid-1700s, parts of the Douro Valley — beginning near the town of