Portuguese wine used to be my insider tip — now it’s everywhere

Like any wine writer, I am frequently asked, “Which wine regions should I be looking out for?”

My standard response for the past few years has been Greece and Portugal, for much the same reasons: an array of indigenous grape varieties combined with dramatically improved winemaking and less-than-established reputations means they can offer real originality and value. But it’s increasingly hard to view Portuguese wine as an outsider.

Maxwell Working of importer Skurnik in New York is responsible for selling wine from both countries. He is pleased by how well Greek wine is selling but says Portuguese wine is now a fully fledged success story, with sales increasing by 65 to 70 per cent over the past five years.

Working sees his role as “getting people to take the leap from Vinho Verde”, the crisp dry white from the far north of Portugal that has dominated US imports for years, thanks to brands such as Gazela and Casal Garcia. The new-wave reds of Filipa Pato and her husband William Wouters from Bairrada are going down especially well with trend-conscious New Yorkers, despite the fact that the region’s signature grape, Baga, is relatively uncompromising in youth.

Rui Abecassis of Olé & Obrigado began importing Portuguese wine into the US as long ago as 2008. He says it’s been a long time since he heard it referred to as “obscure”, which used to be a common refrain. “The US being the US, there are thousands of gatekeeping sommeliers,” he told me. “They are young, experimental, early adopters. They know quality and saw value . . . The tipping point has been the US discovering Portugal itself.”

All the wine importers I spoke to mentioned the importance of the tourism revamp of Lisbon and Oporto that has taken place over the past decade. “The amount of US tourism to Portugal has exploded; it’s like what Santorini has done for Greek wine,” Working observed happily.

Raymond Reynolds, who has been the UK’s leading importer of Portuguese wine since the early 1990s, agrees. “We owe the tourist industry quite a lot,” he enthused. “Our customers are definitely more receptive to Portuguese wine now. And consumers are more comfortable with experimenting and recreating the fun they had in those cities.”

Reynolds was educated in the UK but brought up in Portugal, where his family own the exceptional Mouchão wine estate in Alentejo. When he was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, most Portuguese table wine was rough stuff, carelessly made and rarely branded. Armed with a degree in chemistry, he thought he’d explore career options in Portugal and ended up spending the 1980s working in quality control and then winemaking for Taylor’s Port.

“While I was working with Taylor’s and finding out about the unique expressions of its indigenous grapes and wine potential in Portugal, this light went on in my head,” he said. “I kept coming to the UK and saw all that was available was very cheap supermarket wine. But in Portugal there were pioneering growers waking up to the treasures they had, with wonderful terrain and grapes, making very, very unusual wines. I thought, we’ve got to tell the UK wine trade about this.” Reynolds reminded me that Portugal had joined the EU in 1986 so there was lots of investment into wineries for this new generation of producers.

For the first decade, his focus was on building a critical mass of top-quality producers. Two of his first signings were Dirk Niepoort from the Douro and Luís Pato (Filipa’s father) from Bairrada. “They explored the traditions, used worldly knowledge to make wines rooted in their own terroirs that just kept getting better and better,” he recalled. “They spawned a whole new generation of accomplished producers.”

I asked Reynolds if he thought we’d reached “peak” Portuguese wine. He admitted he didn’t know. “The diversity now is extraordinary — it’s slightly confusing even for me. We hoped this would happen, and now we’re trying to make sense of what’s there, things like different ways of fermenting the rare Viosinho grape or planting Alvarinho in the Algarve . . . We’ve seen facets of grape varieties we never imagined would emerge, yet [producers are] focused on quality. The good thing is we’re just at the beginning of this journey.”

He’s a particular fan of the new generation of wines emerging from Dão in northern Portugal. Wines made there used to be tough as old boots but the region is now producing whites and reds of real sophistication.

Max Graham is a generation younger than Raymond Reynolds and has followed a very similar path, but in hospitality. Son of Johnny Graham of Churchill’s Port, he too is Anglo-Portuguese and, after studying fine art at Newcastle University, opened a pop-up port bar in London’s Soho in 2014 which opened his eyes to how under-represented Portugal then was in the UK restaurant scene.

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By 2016, he had persuaded his father’s backer, Stephen Phipps, to back him in the first Bar Douro, a wine bar near London Bridge specialising in Portuguese table wine. For him, the “pivotal moment in new Portuguese wine” was Portugal’s first alternative wine fair, Simplesmente Vinho, in 2012. Held in Oporto, it was designed to celebrate the emergence of the army of smaller producers working their own vineyards. “I loved that fair and so did [UK-based Portuguese specialist wine writer] Sarah Ahmed,” Graham told me recently during a packed Wednesday lunchtime service in the second Bar Douro, located next to Liverpool Street station in the City of London.

This opened, most unfortunately, in January 2020 — and had to close soon after, thanks to the pandemic. It was natural therefore that Graham, like so many in hospitality, would turn to selling wine online, thereby presumably converting quite a few British wine drinkers to the newfound glory of Portuguese wine.

Meanwhile Graham, with Ahmed as his wine consultant, was plotting an answer to Simplesmente Vinho in London. Festa finally took place last June with 54 winemakers flying in from Portugal. Its lasting legacy is a London-based online source of Portuguese wine, wearefesta.co.uk. It sells to consumers but mostly to the trade. I was planning to list the best avant-garde Portuguese wine producers but I must admit that the 65 producers listed on the Festa site would make a very good start.

Something that should perhaps be added to the list are the names of a few sizeable Portuguese wine companies that have made a notable effort to produce exciting small-scale wines such as Sogrape’s Legado from a spectacular Douro vineyard and Symington Family Estates’ new venture in Alentejo, Quinta da Fonte Souto. Esporão and Howard’s Folly are also producing exciting wine in Alentejo, as are Quinta do Crasto and Quinta de la Rosa in the Douro. In fact, come to think of it, virtually every reputable quinta in the Douro is making great table wine.

Forget it. I couldn’t possibly list every worthwhile Portuguese wine producer here. You’ll have to explore for yourself via one of the good specialist importers — who have so far just scratched the surface.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Some international stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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