Portugal is booming

continue with its successful independent promotional campaign, Wines of Portugal Month, for the third time this June.

Participating retailers in the 2022 campaign reported a Portuguese sales jump of 383.4% in value and 440% in volume compared with the same period in 2021. As ever, 15 retailers will be given support by Wines of Portugal for in-store and online activities. The 15 will also see their efforts promoted on social media by wine writer Jamie Goode, who has partnered with Wines of Portugal for the campaign.

Sustainability: An urgent message

Portuguese producers have been at the forefront in pushing for action on environmental best practice for some years now, with two of the biggest names in the Douro emerging as driving forces in two of the most significant international initiatives focused on the wine industry’s role in confronting the climate crisis.

The Fladgate Partnership (of port brands Taylor’s, Fonseca and Croft) founded the Porto Protocol Foundation, an international non-profit institution formed of hundreds of members “committed to making a greater contribution to mitigate climate change”, while Symington Family Estates (of Cockburn’s, Dow’s, Graham’s, Warre’s and light wine brands Chryseia and Altano) was one of the first wineries to sign up to the Torres and Jackson Family Estates-led Wineries for Climate Action in 2019.

Both businesses, and many others in Portugal, have internal climate action plans, too, and the country is also ahead of many in Europe when it comes to coordinated action via its industry bodies.

Central to Portugal’s sustainability message will be a new National Reference for Sustainability, which was presented at the Wines of Portugal’s Annual Forum last November. The document, which comprises 86 sustainability “indicators”, most of them environmental, is designed to act as a benchmark for producers looking for accreditation.

“The main concern was building a reference that was accessible to producers, but credible for the markets. The aim is to create a national seal that is proof that producers have adapted to these standards,” said Frederico Falcão, of the initiative, the urgency of which was reinforced by vintage conditions in 2022, a year of blistering heat (temperatures reached a July record of 47°C in the Douro) and continued drought across the country.

Wine tourism: Portugal’s superpower

The starry-eyed holidaymaker looking to recreate happy times by buying bottles from their destination once they’ve got back home to Blighty is a familiar figure in independent wine merchants and an important shaper of wine trends. And the boom in tourism to Portugal – with visitor numbers returning to pre-pandemic levels during 2022 – is often cited by merchants as a reason for the growth in popularity

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of the country’s wines.

Of course, most of those visitors aren’t wine tourists, even if many of them are tourists who like to drink wine. But there is no doubt that Portugal has raised its wine tourism game enormously in recent years, with significant improvements in facilities across the country’s wine regions.

That improvement was acknowledged in the latest set of results from The World’s Best Vineyards awards, a competition from the team behind the World’s Best Restaurants, which picks out “the Top 50 most amazing vineyard experiences” in the world each year, which featured eight Portuguese wine estates, the joint-top performance alongside France.

The names singled out were: Quinta do Crasto, Quinta do Infantado, Quinta da Pacheca, Quinta do Bomfim (Symington), Quinta Nova de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, and Quinta do Noval in the Douro, and Quinta de Soalheiro and Quinta da Aveleda in Vinho Verde. A further three estates – the Douro’s Quinta do Vallado and Graham’s Cellars and Quinta da Taboadella in the Dão – made the Top 100.

Douro: New stars emerging alongside the old Boys

The Douro’s strong performance in the World’s Best Vineyards is reflective of its position as the most recognised Portuguese wine region – a position which it shows no sign of losing, with the table wine offer from the region deepening and broadening with every vintage.

The producers that led the late 20thcentury Douro table wine revolution such as Poças, Quinta de la Rosa and the Douro Boys club of top names (Quinta do Vallado, Niepoort, Quinta do Crasto, Van Zellers & Co and Quinta do Vale Meão) have stayed innovative and remain responsible for many of the region’s best wines. But the

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Among the former is Mateus Nicolau de Almeida, a winemaker whose family has deep winemaking roots in the region, but whose latest project is very much of its time: two terroir-driven brands, one devoted to reds from native varieties – one apiece from sites in the Baixo Corgo, the Cima Corgo, and the Douro Superior (Trans Douro Express) – and one to whites made from Rabigato in three plots in the Douro Superior (Emeritas), plus a range known as Curral Teles, devoted to wines made with different types of vinification.

An example of the refreshing influence of the outsider, by contrast, is Quinta de Pedra Alta, a producer with 35ha high up in the Cima Corgo, which was acquired by former Manchester United chief executive

Ed Woodward and his wife Isabelle in 2018. With winemaker João Pires joined by Barossa Valley’s Matt Gant as consultant, and with former Liberty Wines man Andy Brown involved on the commercial side, the project has made a splash with a range of stylishly made and packaged modern wines and ports.

A genuine north-south wine culture

Perhaps the most significant development in Portuguese wine over the past decade has been the development of what football people would call strength in depth, which means it’s now possible to find a range of interesting producers in all of the country’s wine regions.

An elite squad of Portuguese highperformers that have impressed The Wine Merchant in recent months, whether for the first or the latest of many times, might include Quinta de Soalheiro (Vinho Verde), Arribas Wine Company (Trás-os-Montes), Rui Madeira (Beira Interior), Textura (Dão), Filipa Pato and Wim Wouters (Bairrada), Hugo Mendes (Lisboa), Susana Esteban (Alentejo), Monte da Casteleja (Algarve), and the Azores Wine Company (Azores).

A more varied team of all the strengths is hard to imagine.