Appellation Article

By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: October 31, 2007
IT’S hard to think of Portuguese wines without thinking of port. This sweet fortified wine has dominated the Portuguese wine business for centuries, and the hallowed names of the port firms — Fonseca, Taylor Fladgate, Quinta do Noval, Graham’s, Niepoort — continue to conjure up bygone manly scents of leather chairs, dusty books and cigar smoke.
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Go to Blog » Today, though, the excitement in Portugal is in dry wines, particularly reds from the Douro River valley — port territory — a 70-mile stretch of terraced vineyards painstakingly constructed on impossibly steep and rocky hillsides.

Yet in a wine panel tasting of Douro reds one recent afternoon, the conversation kept coming back to port, and in particular, how much these dry wines reminded us of port, without the sweetness, of course.

For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Scott Mayger, general manager of Telepan on the Upper West Side, and Beth von Benz, the wine director at Porter House in the Time Warner Center.

Many of the wines were tannic, though not nearly so tannic as vintage port. But the flavors were what sealed the connection to port — a combination of plummy fruit and spiciness, along with aromas of violets and other flowers, and the occasional pleasant addition of licorice and smoke. If you have ever wondered what port might taste like if it were not fortified and left sweet, here is the chance to find out.

Should we have been surprised? In addition to coming from the same land, reds from the Douro (pronounced DOH-roo) are made from the same grapes. While the rules permit dozens of different grapes to be used to make port, five red grapes are regarded as the best: touriga nacional, touriga franca, tinto cão, tinta barroca and tinta roriz, known in Spain as tempranillo.

Nonetheless, some older Douro vineyards are planted with a blend of so many of the local grapes that even the owners can’t identify all of them. And some producers still adhere to the venerable tradition of crushing grapes by foot in granite lagares, or vats, though these days most lagares have modern temperature controls so that winemakers can manage the fermentation.

Our No. 1 wine, for example, the 2003 Quinta Vale D. Maria from Lemos & Van Zeller, was made from 41 different grapes, the producer says, crushed by foot the old-fashioned way. The result is a structured, spicy, beautifully aromatic wine that, even unfortified, is plenty powerful at 15 percent alcohol. Yet the wine is balanced as well, and, indeed, it reminded us, as Scott put it, of “port without the sugar.”

With its licorice and mineral flavors, our No. 2 wine, the 2004 Casa de Casal de Loivos, also gave that impression, perhaps because it, too, came from Lemos & Van Zeller.

While these wines cost $55 and $30 respectively, our best value, the 2003 Palestra at $8, also was reminiscent of port with its tannins and smoky, licorice aromas and flavors of sweet fruit. And several other wines were in a similar vein, including the exotic, floral 2001 Quinta dos Quatro Ventos Reserva from Caves Aliança and the plum-and-violet-scented 2002 Pintas from Wine & Soul.

Despites its centuries of traditions, the focus on dry wine is a fairly recent phenomenon in Portugal, beginning roughly with its entry into the European Union in 1986.

The country’s wine industry had been insular and antiquated until then, with the notable exception of Mateus and Lancer’s, cheap rosé wines that remain the source of rueful first hangovers the world over. But Portuguese wine producers benefited from an injection of capital that unleashed entrepreneurial energy throughout the country’s wine regions.

Nowhere gained as much as the Douro, where skilled and ambitious winemakers were able to reject the restrictive old cooperative system to make and market their own wines. Many port producers also began to look beyond fortified wines, and today some of those famous port names grace the labels of dry wines as well.

Names like Niepoort, for example, which has been in the port business since 1842 and has made dry wines since the early 1990’s. Niepoort’s 2004 Vertente was big and not so much in the port vein as in the modern international style. Still, it was balanced and distinctive, unlike its more expensive sibling, Niepoort’s 2003 Batuta, an $85 bottle that we felt was over the top — too sweet, too oaky, and practically dripping with saturated fruit.

As with many emerging wine regions, there will be wines like the Batuta, made in so overtly a modern style as to be untethered from its origins. We found a few other expensive wines like this, including, surprisingly, the 2004 Quinto do Vale Meão, a $66 bottle that seemed fat and unfocused, the antithesis of the 2001 Quinto do Vale Meão, which was our favorite wine when we last tasted Douro reds in 2005.

By contrast we found some of the lighter, less ambitious wines to be more distinctive and better values, including the 2003 reserva from Sogrape and an astonishing $6 bottle, the 2005 Porca de Murça from Real Companhia Velha, a modest but juicy and enjoyable wine.

While our favorite Douro reds stayed true to many of their traditions in terms of grapes and flavors, every bottle we opened adhered to another Portuguese tradition: cork. Portugal is the center of the cork industry today, so, naturally, each of the 25 bottles was topped with a cork. Not a one was corked, either.
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