Winelingo
Portugal is a small country with an unusually deep bench. More than 250 grape varieties are native to it, most grown almost nowhere else, and most Portuguese wine is a blend of several of them rather than one named grape. That is the first thing to get used to: labels here name the place, not the variety. It is also why Portuguese wine still tastes distinctly Portuguese.
The second thing is the Douro. In 1756 the minister later known as the Marquês de Pombal had the valley surveyed and demarcated, and over the following years its limits were marked out with granite posts, making it one of the first wine regions anywhere to be legally defined and policed. It was done to protect Port, the fortified wine the British trade had made famous, and for a long time that was almost the whole story. A first serious dry red, Barca Velha, appeared as early as 1952, but only from the 1980s and 1990s did growers turn to dry wine in numbers, using the same grapes on the same schist terraces — and the Douro turned out to be a fine table-wine region that had simply never been asked.
What Portuguese wine tastes like
Portuguese reds are darker and firmer than most people expect. Touriga Nacional, the flagship, smells of violets and black fruit and carries real tannin; blended with its neighbours it makes reds that are dense but still fresh, because the best sites are high enough or cool enough to hold on to acidity. Dão, up in the granite hills, is the elegant, restrained end of the scale. Alentejo, hot and flat, is the ripe and generous end.
The whites divide just as clearly. Vinho Verde is light, tart, often faintly fizzy and low in alcohol — usually nine to eleven per cent — which makes it summer wine in the plainest sense.
Then the fortified pair. Port is sweet, warm and grippy. Madeira runs on the opposite instinct: baked, tangy and almost indestructible, with acidity that cuts straight through the sugar.
