I recently ran a wine masterclass for some friends of my parents who used to live in Portugal back in the 1960s and 70s. Understandably, they were staggered by the quality of the wines which were vastly improved from those that they remembered. But how bad exactly were Portuguese wines a generation ago, and what has changed?
Doing it the modern way - a new vineyard in the Alentejo planted by OHW.
Well, frankly, they were mostly terrible - and the blame lies largely with the Estado Novo regime of the dictator António Salazar, which controlled the country from the early 1930s until the mid '70s.
Salazar attempted to bring order to the nation's jumbled patchwork of tiny vineyards by installing large cooperative wineries, often protected from independent competition by law. Effectively holding monopolies, these of course therefore had no reason to strive for excellence - and since grape growers were paid by weight there was little incentive either for them to try to produce quality fruit in the vineyards. Imported wine was non-existent but the need to supply the African colonies as well meant that Portugal's entire wine strategy was driven towards bulk production. Curiously, given its amazingly good conditions for viticulture, the Alentejo was to be devoted to the production of cereals.
At this time wines from the Dão region were the most popular - the reason being simply that its higher altitude generally meant that the wineries were cooler during the vintage. With no chilling machines available, wines made during hot harvests tended to turn out extremely vinegary. By and large Dão wasn't as warm as other regions so by default its wines were not necessarily better - but certainly less spoilt by heat.
It may sound surprising but one of Portugal's top wineries, Mouchão, deep in the Alentejo, didn't even have electricity until 1991, and when I did work experience there in 1998 the only cooling was provided by sprinklers on top of the fermentation tanks which ran cold water down their steel sides. Likewise, in the Douro, autofermenters are still widely used today. They allow wines to be pumped over using only the pressure generated by the carbon dioxide produced by their own fermentation - an ingenious solution for making wine where you don't have electrical power.
Salazar's dubious viticultural legacy did not end with his regime's demise. Arguably, in fact, its absence permitted a far worse situation to develop, one which actually persisted for at least another decade beyond the 25 de Abril. In the turmoil that reigned for several years after the Revolution there was a period during which militant communist trades unions, over which the authorities had long resigned any pretence of control, dictated agricultural policy by force, especially in the Alentejo. Most of the great independent wine producers (Quinta do Carmo, Mouchão and many more) had their vineyards confiscated, or 'liberated', for the people.
Dodgy Communist spelling - a relic from the Verão Quente of 1975 when Alentejo properties were expropriated for the proletariat.
Many of these properties were not fully returned to their rightful owners (and even then, desperately degraded) until the mid 1980s. This coincided with Portugal joining the European Community (in 1986) and it brought the country's wine laws into alignment with those of the EU - essentially allowing a quality-driven open market to exist for the first time. This effect was particularly pronounced in the Douro where table wines at last had the chance to flourish alongside Port as a result of bureaucratic and legal alterations.
The EU also provided generous subsidies for viticultural research, development and planting, and for improving wineries. In addition, on a national scale, it offered funding for new roads (very useful for transporting grapes to the adega before they start rotting, and for distributing the bottled wines beyond the cellar door) and for bringing electricity and digital connectivity to remote wineries. Viticulture and winemaking became vitally important skills in a more dynamic international marketplace, and dedicated courses therefore also sprung up at a number of universities - thus training the first generation of Portugal's wine professionals.
So where are we now?
We're not necessarily making better wine than the very best of the past, when ideal conditions in the vineyard, during the harvest and in the winery all conspired to coincide very occasionally by happy accident - as anyone who has tasted a 1945 vintage Port or a 1954 Mouchão will testify. But the combination of technical knowledge and technological equipment means that many of the variables are very much more controllable, so we can come much closer, and more often, to recreating ideal conditions with far greater consistency. Two obvious examples of this are the use of irrigation in vineyards to compensate for climatic vagaries, and of course electric pumps, crushers and cooling machines in the adegas. The difference that a simple working telephone makes mid-harvest should also not be underestimated...
Yes, it really was that bad.