Life

Exploring Portugal's Wine Country - International Traveller

Ancient and modern merge in this beloved, beguiling, burgeoning nation.

Rumours of cork's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Across Portugal's Alentejo region, cork oaks rise and fall with the plains, like gnarled stoppers bobbing about on an ocean of golden grass. Vineyards disrupt the montage periodically; but mostly it's the trees from which wine stoppers are punched that dominate the landscape on my journey to Redondo, two hours' drive east of Lisbon.

"I think it's just an excuse to collect a cheaper option, because screw-tops are definitely cheaper than cork," says Celino Santos, a guide at Corktrekking, which offers tours of the cork forest at Herdade da Maroteira winery. "You have to look after your business as well, I guess," he reflects. "But until someone comes and tells us that there's a product that preserves the quality of the wine in a better way, cork will always [be superior]."

LABOUR OF LOVE

Village Of Favaios, At Douro's Highest Point.

Winemakers in Portugal's 31 geographically defined DOCs (Denominao de Origem Controlada) hardly need convincing: the Alentejo, one of these wine-growing regions, is the world's biggest producer of cork. The oaks' pliant bark plugs every last bottle of wine I uncork on my Portuguese sojourn. It's not only in the bottle that wine and cork are intimately acquainted; every village I pass through has a little vineyard, every neighbouring paddock a cork oak burgeoning in the summer sun.

New generations of winemakers, it's reported, are embracing cork's sustainability and capacity to improve the ageing process. But cost remains an obstacle: protected by law, the trees are typically harvested by hand - a delicate and labour-intensive operation in which bark from the trunk and larger limbs is peeled off in unbroken swathes. There won't be a cork harvest at Herdade da Maroteira this year; the last one took place in 2020, and the trees' sheaths must regrow before they can be reaped anew.

"Depending on how much water is in the region and the humidity average, you would need to wait between nine to 12 years between harvests," Santos says. "Here on the estate, every 10 years we have a harvest."

Bottle stoppers are machine-punched from those thick sheets; flimsier layers are used to make the discs glued to the bottom of Champagne stoppers. As the cork oaks rest and replenish their coverlets, the reds they will one day snuggle up to in the bottle are ripening in Herdade da Maroteira's vineyards: Syrah, Alicante Bouschet, Aragonez and the indigenous Touriga Nacional grape.

Though the estate has been in the family for six generations, vines were first planted here in 2000. "A friend said, 'You have the weather, you have the soils, why don't you try to do vineyards?'" Santos says. "At the time they produced I think just shy of 3,000 bottles, and these days we're producing about 250,000 to 300,000 bottles. There's people producing a lot of wine just around here there's a small town called Borba, and they have a co-op winery, they work with 247 producers.

Last year they produced about 18 million litres of wine." This dedication of winemaking isn't surprising in a country with Mediterranean  weather and hundreds of indigenous grape varieties. The Alentejo is one of Portugal's top wine producing regions along with Lisboa and the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Alto Douro Wine Region. To reach this fabled dominion, I must drive to Portugal's second-largest city, Porto, three-and-a half hours north of Lisbon.

Here too, it seems, everything that was old is new again: cranes sway above the city's historic buildings, construction hoardings enclose the blue-tiled So Bento railway station while the metro undergoes expansion. Record numbers of tourists throng Porto's historic laneways; on the opposite shore of the Douro River, they trawl the port wineries at Vila Nova de Gaia.
 

ENTERING THE DOURO

Transporting Cork Harvest By Truck through Alentejo.

Charming as they are, these sister cities are mere portals to the main attraction: the Douro. Since 1756, this stepped landscape has beenthe ancestral home of port wine. "If you want port wine, you add 77 per cent alcohol; it kills the yeast, the yeast cannot eat the sugar and the wine stays sweet or becomes sweet," says Bianca De Jong, program director on Viking Helgrim, the vessel conveying passengers in style through the Douro Valley.

Later, this method was used to preserve Portuguese wines on their voyage to England; brandy-fortified port became established in the 19th century. But Portugal's wine history long predates this fortified variety. Scientists have found evidence of grape cultivation and winemaking in Tartessian settlements near Lisbon's Tagus River dating back to 2000 BC, De Jong says. They were followed by the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans - but it was Cistercian monks who consolidated viticulture here with their French wine-making techniques and their early attempts at fortifying wine."' Peace, pray and work': that was their mantra, and that's what they did.They went over to Scandinavia, they went to Italy, they went to Spain, and they also came to Portugal. Here they started living in monasteries in the Douro region."

"Drink" may have been the unspoken part of their mantra, for it turned out they'd settled on ideal grape-growing terrain - a tilted landscape underpinned by schist and cut through by a river along which barrels could be transported to Porto. In winter, icy rainfall filters throughthe schist; when summer's heat is trapped between the mountains and the Douro becomes a furnace, those aquifers quench the deep-rooted vines."The water in the schist is always lukewarm," De Jong says. "That's a second reason why we have such good wines - not only because they have to work very hard to get to the water, but the water is not cold, it's warm."

OLD MEETS NEW IN THE DOURO

Soaking Up The Scenery With A Douro Dry Red.

Tiborna Open Toast Sandwich Tapas With Sardine And Onion garlic.

But the heat that produces the region's complex, robust wines is intensifying.The fourth- and fifth-generation Symington Family Estates - home to multiple quintas (wineries) and port producers Graham's, Dow's, Warre's and Cockburn's - is responding to climate change with new innovations.

Computer-controlled irrigation drips, climate forecasting software and lasers which minimise run-off by guiding terrace placement are helping to address the effects of a warming planet. The ritualistic tread of human feet, meanwhile, is replicated in the mechanical lagares inventedby Symington in the late 1990s.

"Before 2000... we would crush the grapes with our foot for hours, barefoot - that's no piece of cake," says Regina Duarte, a guide at Graham's Port in Vila Nova de Gaia." [The lagares] improve our production, and even our quality," she says.

Duarte, whose own grandfather worked at a quinta in their hometown of Resende on the banks of the river, marvels at such generational evolution. "If I told my grandfather this was happening now at the Douro, he would be mesmerised," she says."Nowadays we have all sorts of technology to see the alcohol content, the acidity, the sugar. Back in the day, we would have to literally take a sip of every one of the glasses to see how they work."

But the ghosts of grandfathers past linger at Graham's, which can be visited during an optional excursion on Viking's ten-night Portugal's River of Gold itinerary. Rubies, tawnies and vintage port (made from an outstanding single vintage) age  as they've always done in their oak barrels. While the landmark 2000 vintage ushers in a new millennium with its cherry pie finish, the 40-year-old tawny's profile has a venerable sensibility. "It's your grandfather smoking a cigar and drinking port - it's strong, it's serious, it's rigid," Duarte says. Sadly, the nuances of the Ne Oublie - an 1882 single harvest tawny commemorating the year forefather Andrew James Symington arrived in Portugal from the UK - remains a mystery to me. At around AU$1,330 for a single tasting and AU$27,400 for a bottle, few people can attest to its sublimity.What a pleasant surprise, then, for those who happened to be at Graham's visitors centre in the Douro last summer when a kindly American bought the last bottle on the shelf. "He came outside to the terrace, cranked it open and gave a glass to every single person sitting [there]," Duarte says.

THE FUTURE OF PORTUGUESE WINE?

The Decorated Blue And White Tiles Of Sao Bento Station.

A Scenic Town In Alentejo, Portugal.

Mercifully, my onboard tipple is within easier reach: Aveleda's Vinho Verde DOC, an early harvest "green wine" from the western Douro; Alenta Reserva Tinto, a blend of Syrah, Aragonez and Touriga Nacional from the Alentejo. And though we're losing sight of the seashore as we sail inland, Executive Chef Cesar Mata's menu is abundant with regional fare: sardine toasts, Portuguese fish soup, salted cod, mussels steamed in wine. Even the port wine pudding and almond tart are faithful to this region - and a fitting accompaniment to the landscape unspooling beside us as we cruise all the way to the Spanish border 213 kilometres upriver.

At the Douro's highest point, vineyards dripping with Moscatel Galego encircle the village of Favaios. Around half of the 1,000 residents belong to Adega Cooperativa de Favaios, a co-operative winery established in 1952. Though the farmers' ancestors were cultivating grapes here in the 18th century, modern
techniques have transformed their viticultural economy.

"Everything is almost 100 per cent controlled by computers... This kind of mechanical arm will take multiple samples of the grapes, and in about 30 seconds we have already the results," says guide Gonalo Martins as we tour the winery. "This result is very important for us - first, because we pay the farmers not only by the weight, but also by the quality of the grapes, by the sugar. The more the sugars, the more they receive for their grapes."Lighter and less alcoholic than port, the fortified drop has won several awards in international competitions.

"You know, for a village with 1,000 inhabitants having wines like this, it makes us very proud," Martins says, uncorking a bottle.Perhaps Favaios exemplifies the emergence of a novel blend: old and new, young and old, progressive yet preserved. So evolution unfolds along the Douro River, an ancient crop alchemised with modern apparatus and plugged with a timeless substance stripped from a tree in the Alentejo.

The writer travelled independently in Alentejo and as a guest of Viking in the Douro.