Next port of call – the Douro

A week before the 2019 programme of La Ruta de Don Federico gets underway, I take a short ‘busman’s holiday’ downriver and over the nearby Portuguese border, where I find two bodegas of historical character and charm.

Little more than an hour west of Salamanca, the River Duero, one of the the Iberian peninsula’s greatest waterways, meets and then forms 112km of the frontier between Spain and Portugal – a historically impenetrable barrier to invading forces raiding in either direction given the vertiginous canyons through which it passes – maintaining not only a geographical but also a cultural and linguistic divide in the process.

Rising at 2160m in the Picos de Urbión, the Duero meanders its way 572km across the northern Spanish meseta, crossing no fewer than five provinces of Castile and León – Soria, Burgos, Valladolid, Salamanca and Zamora, names well-known to aficionados of the excellent red wines of La Ribera del Duero and fresh white verdejos of Rueda.

All along its route and across the span of its huge basin the river brings life to almost all the wine territories west of La Rioja, but its viticultural importance doesn’t end at the border crossing. Emerging from the canyons of the Las Arribes appellation, where some of the most innovative small-scale Spanish wine-makers are forging a reputation for excellence, it still has 213km to run once it has passed from international to Portuguese territory. Here though it assumes its new Atlantic-oriented moniker of the Douro, a name it will retain till it eventually meets the sea at Porto, sweeping majestically past the cellars of the great fortified wine producers Caves Ferreira, Caves Cálem, Taylor’s, Sandeman, Graham’s and Churchill.

The grapes for those and other robust wines are cultivated on the banks of the river much higher in the highlands, where the vines nestle among pretty almond and olive groves, and it was to this region of steep terraces and traditional quintas – Portuguese wine estates – that I travelled along the narrow twisting roads of the Douro Vinhateiro region before dropping down to the river bank at its confluence with the Pinhão River. This is not far downstream from the Côa run out, where 28 years ago archeologists discovered perhaps the world’s oldest surviving outdoor graffiti art, 30,000-year-old Paleolithic rock carvings of deer, goats, horses and the horned forerunners of domesticated cattle. The find was so significant that the Portuguese Government cancelled a major dam project that would have flooded the whole area and what is now a national park soon became classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

But it is rock carving of a different kind that attracts me to the bodega of Quinta Da Foz though, a characterful winemaking facility dating back more than 150 years (most of them up until recently in the hands of the aforementioned Cálem family) where the antique stone lagaradas are not only preserved but play an active part in the annual harvest rituals.

Once the grapes from the surrounding 10 hectares of 80-year-old vines have been hand-picked between September and October, they are emptied directly into these huge but shallow granite tanks to be tramped underfoot in the traditional way – a gentle pressing method which helps maintain an agreeable level of tannins in the must, resulting in excellent table wines and port wines of the varieties typical of the region: Touriga Nacional, a highly tannic, vigorous variety that needs careful control to produce Portugal’s best wines; the lighter, more fragrantly perfumed Touriga Franca which adds finesse; and my old friend Tinta Roriz, known back in the terroir of La Ruta de Don Federico as Tempranillo. The wines age in oak barrels in cellars that pre-date the prestigious Cálem family owners by 76 years, built in 1796 with shale walls that maintain constant temperature and humidity during the maturation.

Among the award-winning range I am particularly taken by their white port, Da Foz Porto Branco – a highly aromatic, sweet and fruity yet refreshing and delicate blend of low-yield Viosinho, Rabigato, Malvasia Fina and Gouveio grapes – and a few bottles are purchased to make the journey back to Spain with me. While it seems mad to bring back a bottle of olive oil in the case – Spain after all exports more of the stuff than any other country – the bodega’s Fifth Foz Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil proves impossible to resist, produced from olives of the estate’s 10 hectares of 100-year-old groves, cold-pressed and handled following traditional and 100% ecological processes.

My next stop in the Alto Douro is lunch with oenologist António Dias Teixeira, the jovial incumbent proprietor of an independent wine estate that has been in his family for more than 250 years. Founded in 1751, Quinta do Bucheiro is a quirky and fascinating winery situated at an elevation of 220m in an area enjoying microclimatic conditions, with 40 hectares of vines, antique stone lagaradas for traditional pressing by foot, centuries-old cellars of American, French and Portuguese oak, an onsite bottling facility, and a wine cave tunnelled into the hillside 15m beneath the winery buildings for the storage of the their Travela sparkling wine, fermented in bottle in the traditional champagne method from a blend of Malvasia Fina and Gouveio white grapes.

A variety of table wines, Port wine and Moscatel Galego aperitif wine complete the surprising ensemble emanating from this enterprising but unassuming winery, and when it seems that there can be little more for António to spring on me, he leads me into a lovingly curated miniature museum in one of the oldest parts of the village estate house. It was here in this same room that the distinguished scientist and viticulturist Dr Joaquim Pinheiro de Azevedo Leite Pereira studied and worked to find a solution to the phylloxera blight which all but wiped out the vines of the Douro in the late 19th century.

Conducting trials with notable French winemakers he heavily promoted the technique of grafting traditional Portuguese grape varieties onto new American rootstocks, and in the process went down in history as ‘the saviour of the Douro’. His methods were quickly adopted across all of Portugal’s wine regions, arresting the devastation caused by the blight. António is rightly proud of this family ancestry yet maintains a charming humility to go with his cheery disposition and the family tradition of producing first-class grapes for the Quinta do Bucheiro Port and Ceirós table wine, produced under the Denomination of Controlled Origin.

With a light spring drizzle now falling I elected to get a little closer to the waters I know so well in their Spanish guise, descending to the pretty village of Pinhão to board a traditional, indigenous Rabelo boat – a flat-bottomed, shallow draught, wooden cargo boat used for centuries to ferry barrels of wine from the Alto Douro to the cellars and warehouses of Porto for storage, trade and worldwide export – the fastest and most efficient means of transportation between the vineyards and the sea in the years before the arrival of the railways. As we float serenely past vine-terraced banks, the few other passengers aboard take shelter in the covered wheelhouse, leaving me to quietly sip my Ceirós Tinto with its red fruit and earthy, chocolate notes, and trace the course of the Duero/Douro in my mind as it ceaselessly winds its way to the Atlantic.

Take a look at the lagaradas of Quinta da Foz in use (video courtesy of Porto Canal Douro):