The New Douro
Portugal's unique wine region reaches beyond Port to make world-class reds
Kim Marcus
Posted: December 15, 2008
On a cold winter's afternoon, smoke from a wood-burning fire swirls in the damp air at Quinta do Nápoles in Portugal's Douro River Valley. The small, ramshackle winery, perched on a ridge surrounded by steeply terraced vineyards, is packed to the rafters with oak barrels and winemaking equipment. Dirk Niepoort, of the famed Port winemaking family, has just shown an impressive array of reds. A hearty meal, featuring roasted goat, is served—perfectly Portuguese, in a place seemingly isolated from the modern world. That was back in 2002—and how times have changed.
On a warm day this past May, I returned to a Nápoles transformed into a massive, futuristic winery built as a series of staggered terraces that mimic the surrounding topography. A gallery of opaque skylights illuminates the cavernous space that houses large stainless-steel tanks. Barrel cellars are dug into the steep hillside. Native schist encases the entire structure, and the result signals power and permanence without grandiosity. It is a testament to the new Douro.
"It took nine years of planning and nine months of building," says Niepoort, a pusher of boundaries in the Douro who also is an intellectual mentor to many of the region's younger winemakers and established estates. The old Nápoles still exists, an annex to the new winery and a presence that stands as a bridge between past and future. "We're a Third World country that wants to make First World wines," Niepoort says.
Portugal is far from Third World; this is still Western Europe after all, and the Douro is already a premier appellation—thanks to the magnificent Ports vinified here for hundreds of years. But the crux of Niepoort's analysis is correct. A flood of new investment, from both local and foreign sources, is swiftly changing the face of the Douro, a singular event in the world of wine.
Modernity is speeding in. A new international airport in Porto, Portugal's second-largest city, lying at the mouth of the Douro, provides easy connections to major European and North American cities. Multilane highways have opened up access, supplanting long and harrowing rides on narrow, winding roadways. And the pace of investment in tourist-related facilities is quickening, with a pair of luxury resorts opening in the past year, and more on the way.
The focus of fervent winemaking desire today, spearheaded by old-line Port houses, long-established family wineries and newcomers alike, is to make the Douro known for great table wines. The growth in quality during the past decade has been as impressive as it has been swift, based on richly flavored and powerful red wines made mostly from blends of native Portuguese grapes.
The success has drawn a wave of outsiders who are also staking a claim on the Douro. Bordeaux heavyweights Bruno Prats, formerly of Château Cos-d'Estournel, and Jean-Michel Cazes, of Château Lynch-Bages, are involved in joint ventures to make table wines. The Roederer Champagne house owns Ramos-Pinto, and the peripatetic François Lurton has invested in a Douro domaine. Americans, Germans and South Africans are also making wine here.
French vintner Michel Chapoutier, who excels with intense reds from Syrah in the Rhône Valley, compares Touriga Nacional, the Douro's highest-quality grape, to Syrah, and he is now making Portuguese wine from the Estremadura district near Lisbon. Prats, who makes an ageworthy Douro red called Chryseia in a joint venture with the Symington family of Port renown, says the Douro's pedigree is unquestionable. "I have always considered the Douro to be one of the great established terroirs of the world."
The turning point for Douro table wines came with the 2000 vintage, when top producers made deep, rich and intensely flavored wines nearly across the board. Characterized by ripe dark fruit and spice flavors, with firm acidity and fresh minerality, these bottlings announced the seemingly overnight birth of a fine table-wine region.
Today, the top Douro reds continue to mine a similar vein of flavors, with many featuring distinctive creaminess and vivid notes of raspberry and smoke. Gone are the fearsome tannins and dried-out fruit flavors that dominated many Douro bottles prior to 2000. They have been replaced with a silkiness and depth of fruit that speak to the Douro's terroir and its unique grapes.
The 2007 vintage, now in bottle, promises another chapter in the evolution of the Douro's quality. A somewhat cooler than normal summer allowed the grapes to ripen slowly and develop well into the harvest season, which was warm and dry. The 2007 harvest is also expected to be a declared year for Vintage Port, and possibly the best since 2003 for these fortified wines.
"I think '07 in general is one of the best years in the Douro since 1970," says Cristiano Van Zeller of Quinta do Vale Dona Maria and Quinta de Roriz. "1970 was a great Port year, but Douro table wines back then weren't even on the table." Niepoort agrees: "The 2000 vintage is the best so far, and I think with the 2007 vintage, we went another two steps higher on the quality level."
Until the mid-1990s, Port producers looked at table wine only as an afterthought. Age-old traditions guided the insular world of the Port trade, and the vast majority of Douro table wines were of inferior quality. The best grapes and winemaking efforts went into Port—forming a feedback loop that guaranteed table-wine mediocrity.
Yet there were glimpses of what could be. In the early 1950s came Barca Velha, which blended grapes used in traditional Port production but fermented them dry without fortification. It is still made and released only in what are deemed outstanding years, as with Vintage Port. Aged seven years in bottle before release, the most recent version, the 1999, scored 93 points on Wine Spectator's 100-point scale.
Experiments percolated after the Portuguese revolution, in 1974. João Nicolau de Almeida of Ramos-Pinto began to consistently produce high-quality table wines under the Duas Quintas label beginning in the early 1990s. Van Zeller vinified selections of Portuguese grape varieties during his tenure at Quinta do Noval, as did the Symingtons at Quinta do Bomfim. Then came the thunderclap of the 2000 vintage. Much of the energy in 2000 came from producers who would eventually band together for marketing purposes and call themselves the Douro Boys. Today their ranks include the owners of five companies: Niepoort, Quinta do Crasto, Quinta do Vale Dona Maria, Quinta do Vallado and Quinta do Vale Meão.
Whether the Douro can produce profound and ageworthy wines on a consistent basis and in significant quantities—and in a distinctively native style—is the big question for its winemakers. There's an air of excitement and anticipation, but also trepidation as the Douro reaches for a new destiny. "The Douro is boiling," says Niepoort's Nápoles winemaker, Luis Seabra.
"The model is Tuscany in terms of changing the image," says Paul Symington, whose family has been making Port since the 17th century and is now making impressive red table wines. "There's a real euphoria, but now we have to turn this into something really commercial."
"We are just at the beginning," says Christian Seely of AXA Millésimes, which owns the Douro's most famous Port estate, Quinta do Noval. "I told my staff when I first started here that we have to aspire to Châteaus Latour, Mouton, Margaux—of course that was for Port, but the same could apply now to table wines." Seely, who took the reins of Noval in 1994, is now planning a table-wine-only facility at this most hallowed ground of Port.
Key to the ultimate potential of the Douro is its unique winemaking geography, which is defined by the steep slopes cut by the Douro River on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. It is a rugged region of wild beauty, a huge domain of steep mountain vineyards that rise from the depths of the Douro's banks.
The Douro begins its journey in north-central Spain, where it is known as the Duero (and where the Ribera del Duero district is producing profound and deeply flavored reds as well). The searing, dry heat of the Iberian plateau dominates the climate in summer. Centuries-old quintas are perched on ridges and slopes, and the native biome of wild scrub and herbs fills the steep terrain between the vineyards. Diverse microclimates abound in a vineyard realm that varies from 500 feet in altitude at river level to more than 2,500 feet at the top of the highest slopes.
The best vineyards for Port production are usually at the lower altitudes, nearest the river. These are the warmest sites and hence deliver the ripest grapes for the sweetness and power that are the hallmarks of the best Ports. The best table-wine vineyards are usually found at higher altitudes, proponents such as Niepoort argue, where the air is cooler, allowing for longer maturation and more balanced and delicate flavors.
Many prime vineyards and quintas (estates) are situated around the small and unassuming town of Pinhão. The Pinhão Valley is home to Noval, and neighboring valleys, such as those of the Rio Torto and Rio Tedo (where Nápoles is located), also offer excellent terroir. Collectively, this area is known as Cima Corgo. Another key region for table-wine production is the Douro Superior, which lies upriver from Pinhão and extends to the Spanish border. It is home to Quinta do Vale Meão, where Barca-Velha was originally made, and several new vineyard projects by top Douro quintas.
"The magic part of the Douro is all the microclimates, all the different altitudes and exposures at all the different quintas," says Tomás Roquette, who oversees the cellar at his family's estate, Quinta do Crasto, a historic Port winery that today is one of Douro's best table-wine producers.
The Douro's geological profile is dense and minerally, consisting mostly of schist with intrusions of granite. Schist provides excellent drainage as well as the solar energy from by sunlight reflecting off its shiny facets.
Everywhere are the vineyard terraces, which were made by hand over the centuries. Many today are abandoned, the result of the scourge of phylloxera in the 19th century, and overgrown with scrub, but old-vine vineyards survive, some just barely, and can produce fantastic fruit. Vineyards 80, 90, even 100 years old are still waiting to be reclaimed.
Yet while the history is deep and the terroirs (potentially) numerous, quality is not uniform. As top quintas near the river speed ahead in innovation and quality, the pace of change is much slower on the slopes, where thousands of small holdings dominate. "In my view, there are two Douros—the deeper valley, where you produce big, rich reds, and the highlands, where you usually have the wrong grapes or the wrong wines," says Pedro da Silva Reis of Real Companhia Velha. "It needs to be remade."
For Niepoort, it boils down to a matter of working with the growers and showing them that quality trumps quantity—and timeworn patterns of cultivation. "The growers are listening more and more," he says. We tell them when to pick, and that is not easy." Still, he considers the effort worth it.
"There are great nuances in the Douro," Niepoort adds. "The old people knew their parcels, what varieties to plant. Modern winemakers don't know what to do with an older vineyard—it is much more complicated."
Niepoort winemaker Seabra shares his enthusiasm in the hunt for sites. "The old vineyards have character, intensity and a freshness that is hard to describe," he says.
In contrast, Noval's Seely thinks the future of the Douro will be defined by how quickly it can catch up with the rest of the winemaking world. "Dirk sees an old vineyard, maybe 150 years old, with two bunches of grapes per vine and says, 'They really knew what they were doing back then. This is the real Douro.' I'm more likely to bulldoze and get the vineyard up to speed," Seely says.
The five classic grapes used in Port production—Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz, Touriga Franca, Tinta Cão and Tinta Barroca—are also preferred by most table-wine producers. Touriga Nacional is the most distinctive, with intense red plum, mineral and savory herbal flavors. But it constitutes only 2 percent of the region's vineyards. Tinta Roriz, the Portuguese name for the Spanish Tempranillo grape, delivers delicious cherry and spice flavors. Of the remaining three varieties, Touriga Franca is the most important due to its broad distribution; it is the most widely planted grape in the Douro, accounting for more than 20 percent of the vines, and provides the backbone for many of its highest-quality and best-priced reds.
All together, more than 80 grape varieties are planted among the Douro's 100,000 acres of vineyard, a complex mosaic of holdings that are cultivated by 39,000 growers. And there are still surprises. Recently, do Crasto's Roquette stumbled across a grape variety he was unfamiliar with on the family's property. "It looked like a [miniature] watermelon with little white stripes," Roquette says with a laugh. He was told it is called Barreto dos Frades. "It was only identified because one of our vineyard workers knew what it was."
Red wine blends from native grapes will dominate the Douro's table wine offerings for the foreseeable future. In addition to the big five, Portuguese varieties such as Tinta Amarela, Sousão, Rufete and others may be a part of the blend. For example, Van Zeller combines nearly 30 varieties in his Dona Maria red, a function of the random nature of his old-vine plantings. This is consistent with other older vineyards in the region; as individual vines died, they were usually replaced by whatever a grower had at hand. Single-variety bottlings of Portuguese grapes are rare.
In addition, a smattering of whites based on Portuguese grapes holds out the promise for high quality, though their quantities are small. Plantings of international varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah, are still mostly experimental and will probably not play an important role in the Douro's viticultural mix.
Because of the history of interplanting, it is hard for many smaller growers to state with certainty which vines they cultivate. Yet slowly there has been a concerted effort to sort things out, with widespread replanting to upgrade declining and low-quality vineyards, and to promote lower-cost mechanization techniques. Discovering which varieties do the best in a given exposure, soil and altitude, as well as which clones thrive, will be key to the Douro's future.
One of the guiding lights of Douro viticulture is the affable João Nicolau de Almeida of Ramos-Pinto. Throughout his career, he has been a tireless researcher into ways to increase the quality of the Douro's grapes and vineyards. The focus of his efforts is Quinta da Ervamoira, a vineyard sanctuary in the harsh landscape of the Douro Superior near the Rio Côa. The estate, founded by his uncle, José Antonio Ramos-Pinto, in 1974, was the first in the Douro to be planted with vertical trellises and by blocks dedicated to individual varieties. Experimentation and studies continue, most notably into testing which varieties work best in which microclimates.
"For me [continuing research] means a lot. It's one of the reasons why I stayed at Ramos-Pinto," says Almeida. (The Roederer Champagne house has owned Ramos-Pinto since 1994.) "My uncle's vision for Ervamoira was to realize the ideal quinta for the Douro. I think that vision has been realized, but there is still a lot more to do with viticulture."
The stakes are high: Douro viticulture is an expensive undertaking. Steep slopes and terraced vineyards are expensive to plant, maintain and harvest. It can cost up to $100,000 to develop 1 hectare (2.47 acres) of vineyard—all this for yields that are miserly (in the case of the Symingtons, as low as 1.6 tons per acre). Winemaking facilities can be problematic; historic quintas are beautiful but mostly impractical to upgrade for larger operations.
Besides the Douro's unique geography, there is the legacy of the region's winemaking traditions. Historically, grapes have been fermented in lagares, large, shallow, open stone basins in which the grapes were trodden by foot.
Port producers still prefer this method, in which the fermentations are hot, fast and controlled by the addition of the spirits that give Port its alcoholic power. The alcohol at once stops the fermentation and stabilizes the wine—which originally allowed Port shippers to deliver casks of fresh, young-tasting and still fruit-filled wines to England and beyond.
Many table-wine vintners also prefer lagares. "lagares are good [because] you can pick up the grapes and you can see what is happening," says Jorge Moreira of Poeira and Quinta de la Rosa. "At this time of globalization, you must keep your personality in the wine, and I think that lagares do that," says Jorge Borges, who, with his wife, Sandra Tarvares, oversees Wine & Soul, the couple's small winery in the Pinhão Valley.
Newcomers to the region are impressed with lagares as well. "What is very interesting is that they stabilize the color with a lot of oxidation at the start," says François Lurton, who ferments his red wines initially in lagares at his Pilheiros estate.
Yet there are risks, and costs. "lagares are much more dangerous [to wine] than tanks because they were made to make Port," Borges says. Temperature control in an open-air environment is challenging; vintners rely on methods that may include dry ice placed into the must, or the insertion of cooling tubes.
lagares themselves have undergone change. The Symingtons prefer stainless steel—and computer controls-—to stone. "The Douro used to be a place where you'd see how wine was made in ancient times, in Roman times. But now we have robotic lagares, [which mimic foot-trodding]," says Paul Symington.
Others, such as Prats, are less sanguine about lagares. There are no lagares at the production facility for Chryseia, located at Quinta da Perdiz. Instead stainless tanks are used for fermentation. "As with our philosophy in Bordeaux, we do long, soft extraction with not much pumping over. If you apply the Port philosophy to table wines, you get very well structured wines at the expense of elegance," Prats says.
This debate over the value of lagares is part of a larger one revolving around the style and character of the Douro's table wines. Interestingly, it harks back to the earliest days of the region's modern winemaking history and to the man first to explore, map and promote many of its best quintas and vineyards: Joseph James Forrester.
In the mid-19th century, Forrester challenged the prevailing market-driven philosophy that Port should be sweet and fortified. Instead he advocated dry wines, in the league of the best Burgundies and Bordeaux. An Englishman who spoke Portuguese, he was fascinated by the region's terroir, though he ultimately lost his battle with the powerful Port trade.
Today, the dominance of Port in the Douro is on the wane. The trigger has been the stagnation of the Port market. While the quality of Ports of all types remains high, sales have been virtually static for a decade or more. It is possible to buy top vintages of mature Ports on the auction market for less than $100 a bottle, which pales in comparison with the sums routinely paid for top Bordeaux, Burgundy and cult wines from California, Italy and elsewhere.
The issue now is in what direction Douro table wines will go: Will its vintners amplify the powerful flavors of its grapes, or seek a more restrained path that may be more appealing to an international audience?
"Concentration of the flavors in the grapes is not a problem in the Douro. There is more of a problem in getting finesse and elegance, but Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca can deliver finesse," Prats says.
"I feel that Douro wines can be a little bit what we call bruto in Portuguese—tough, with very fresh flavors of mineral, plum and berry, and plenty of structure," says Johnny Graham, who makes outstanding and well-priced red under the Churchill Estates label. He comes from a long line of Port producers. "You've got to be careful about making wines that are too alcoholic," he adds.
Quinta do Vale Meão 2005 (94, $62) rests on the powerful and rich side of the Douro flavor continuum. It has intense flavors of raspberry, mocha, dark plum and chocolate and an impressive minerality and creaminess that lingers on the long, lush finish. Although foot-trodden for initial fermentation, the rest of the winemaking is very modern: The wine is aged 70 percent in new French oak, and its grapes come from a vineyard that would be familiar to a New World vintner with trellises and block planting.
A wine in a similar style is the Ramos-Pinto Duas Quintas Reserva Especial. The 2006 (92, $35) is concentrated and vibrant, with intense flavors of raspberry, blueberry and dark cherry. The grapes for the Reserva Especial are harvested from a vineyard featuring a mix of traditional Port varieties. With its heady flavors and aromas, the Reserva Especial is made in what I call a dry Port style.
On the subtler side are the wines made by the Symingtons, Prats with Chryseia and some of the Niepoort bottlings. In their Altano Reserva 2006 (89, $19), the Symingtons utilized Touriga Franca (80 percent) with the remainder Touriga Nacional to make an alluring mix of sweet spice and cherry flavors backed by firm acidity. It was fermented in stainless-steel tanks and then aged in large American oak casks for 10 months.
Niepoort is an inveterate experimenter who is fascinated by Burgundy and seeks to instill Burgundian finesse in his wines. "We live in an area where it is easiest to get richness and ripeness," he says, "but we are looking for lightness. We don't want heaviness and fatness." Niepoort's production techniques reflect his efforts to push the boundaries of Douro winemaking by exploring combinations of modern and traditional protocols.
Niepoort's signature effort is Charme, a blend of mostly Tinta Roriz and Touriga. The grapes were initially foot-trodden and fermented in stone lagares; fermentation was completed in barrels, and then the wine was barrel-aged for 16 months. The 2005 version (95, $98) is one of the most elegant red Douros yet made, featuring refined flavors of plum, raspberry and sandalwood backed by silky tannins and a long, mocha- and cream-filled finish.
To tread or not to tread; older vines or newer plantations; Touriga Nacional or Touriga Franca, or blends of those grapes and dozens more; bold and ripe, or elegant and supple: These are just a few of the complex dynamics at play in one of the most inspiring—and challenging—wine regions in the world.
The Douro is a fascinating work in progress, where tradition and modernity are clashing to create something entirely new. A collegiality exists among the likes of the Douro Boys, the Port estates and the younger Portuguese that will be critical to fashioning the future.
The power and majesty of the Douro that is alive in its Ports is struggling to find a new expression in its table wines. "Every time I come here, I'm astonished about the pace of change," Niepoort says. "It's big evolution." Where that evolution will lead is still very much in question, but there is little doubt that a great new table-wine region has come onto the world stage.
