The History of Wine in 100 Bottles by Clarke Oz

The History of Wine in 100 Bottles by Clarke Oz

Author:Clarke, Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-910496-80-0
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2015-04-15T16:00:00+00:00


Above Left: Wonderfully understated, the rudimentary label that ushered in the modern era of great Australian wine. It doesn’t even say it’s an Australian wine.

Above Right: The label of this modern Grange is still reassuringly unflashy. And I like the homage to Max Schubert in the top left-hand corner.

Barca Velha – the first great Douro table wine. This bottle was the tenth release from Barca Velha since its first vintage of 1952.

1952

Barca Velha

The history of the Douro region of Portugal as the producer of some of Europe’s most exquisite table wines, both red and white – but overwhelmingly red – is extremely recent. Indeed, it’s virtually a 21st-century phenomenon. But it began in 1952.

It always amazed me how poor Douro red wine was. It was offered to you almost apologetically if you dined with port shippers in Oporto. After they’d enthusiastically plied you with slugs of icy white port, a barely digestible drink of which they seemed inordinately proud, they would then ladle out a dark, chewy, baked red wine simply because the main course required it, but all their attention was on the sweet fortified red port wine that would be lingered over until the night was old. If you were dining up the Douro Valley with the shippers, the white port routine was similar, but it tasted more refreshing on a verandah gazing out over the river valley. The dense, chewy red was dismissed as the house plonk. And, of course, the vintage ports tasted wonderful and inspired scholarly comparison of their qualities, witty conversation and impenetrable slumber in about equal measure. A British consul in Oporto had written in 1880 that Douro table wine was a ‘strong, rough and comparatively flavourless wine. If a man were to add six drops of ink to a glass of very common red burgundy he would get something exceedingly like unfortified port.’ From some of my experiences, he was being kind.

The thing is that Douro wine used to be shipped to England unfortified and dry, and the English drank it because it was cheap and French wines were unavailable because of war. They called it blackstrap. Once sweet fortified port caught on during the 18th century, all the best grapes from all the best vineyards were used for that. Grapes that were unripe, or, more likely, overripe and raisined were used for table wine. Yet sweet port had all that sugar to disguise any roughness and nastiness. Dry table wine displayed all its faults, especially when the grapes had been given the crude handling common in port production until quite recently. Indeed, the leading port houses used to make the most cloddish table wine and it is significant that it was Ferreira, one of the greatest producers of delicate tawny ports, who decided there had to be a way to make decent dry red wine in the Douro. In 1950, they sent their technical director, Fernando Nicolau de Almeida, to Bordeaux to learn how they made red wines that were so refined and balanced.



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