Portuguese promise

Portuguese vineyards are a well-kept secret. Until recently they were so secret that if you asked a farmer which grape variety he was growing in a certain plot, he would simply shrug his shoulders. This wasn't because he was being coy; he simply didn't know.

The response seems curious in a world that is increasingly dominated by globe-trotting grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay that grow in neatly delimited areas. But Portugal is different. For the past century or so, the country's vineyards have been in a state of confusion. Ever since phylloxera swept through Europe destroying everything in its path, Portugal has been something of a varietal terra incognita; hence the "I know nothing" replies.

This doesn't mean that there's nothing worth knowing. On the contrary, Portuguese vineyards are an extraordinary treasure trove of native grape varieties. Strangely enough, the port shippers were among the first to realise this. In the early 1980s they founded ADVID, an association devoted to research and development in the port vineyards of the Douro. With more than 80 different grape varieties growing in the region, their research was painstaking but they eventually came up with five (the so-called top cinco) for planting in batches.

Other regions are now taking up the gauntlet. Their task is complicated by the fact that a grape variety has half a dozen or more names depending on where it is grown, some changing their identities from one village to the next. And there are some weird and wonderful names to reckon with. Who would contemplate labelling a wine Esgana C‹o, a white grape variety that translates as "dog strangler", or Borrado das Moscas, meaning "fly droppings"?

Apart from the predictable Mateus Rosé, Portuguese wines are conspicuously absent from hotel and restaurant wine lists in the UK. This is regrettable as, with recent improvements in winery technology, there is no shortage of good, inexpensive wine coming out of the country.

One of the few places where Portugal and Spain share some of the same grape varieties is in the north-west corner of the Iberian peninsula where Spanish Galicia adjoins the Vinho Verde region. Here some very promising white grapes are emerging from the viticultural tangle.

Just to the south-east of the Vinho Verde region, the Douro valley shares another important variety with the Spanish, Tinta Roriz. It is known over the border as Tempranillo, Cencibel, Ojo de Llebre and, upstream in the Spanish Duero, as Tinta del Pais, Tinto Fino or Tinto de Toro. The Douro's solid Roriz-based reds are closer in style to the wines of Ribera del Duero or nearby Toro than they are to the softer, strawberryish Tempranillo-based Riojas.

Other quality grape varieties in the Douro, such as Touriga Nacional, Touriga Francesa and Tinta Baroca, are suited to producing dark, tannic port rather than unfortified wine. Douro wine itself has often been treated as no more than a by-product of port and used to be agonisingly tough and astringent.

One of the first to tackle the tannin problem was Fernando Nicolau de Almeida of port shippers Ferreira. Back in 1952, he launched the exceptional Barca Velha after an educational visit to Bordeaux.

Other port shippers are now following suit. Ramos Pinto has recently triumphed with a wine called Duas Quintas (meaning two farms) blended from grapes grown on two first class port vineyards, Quinta da Ervamoira and Quinta dos Bons Ares. Dutch family-owned port shipper Niepoort has recently launched a stupendous red wine named Redoma, which is so good that it could soon rank with Barca Velha for pole position among Portuguese reds.

There are also good Douro reds from smaller producers such as the Bergqvist family's Quinta de la Rosa and Quinta das Lamelas, and Domingos Alves de Sousa's outstanding 1992 Quinta de Gaivosa and 1994 Quinta do Vale de Raposa, both packed with ripe Douro fruit.

The king of port grapes, Touriga Nacional, is now making an impact on the granite soils in the D‹o region, immediately to the south of the Douro. For years the region was hindered by out-moded co-operative winemaking, but recently a number of independent producers have started to make wines with real character.

Sogrape, Portugal's largest wine-maker, is leading the way with a big, peppery red called Duque de Viseu that includes a good proportion of Touriga Nacional, along with D‹o stablemates Jaén, Alfrocheiro Preto and Tinta Pinheira.

Promising single estates are also emerging, the best of which include Quinta dos Maias and Quinta dos Roques that combine Jaén fruit with big, dark Touriga Nacional fruit and a lot of new oak.

Bairrada is unusual in that it is the only region in Portugal to rely mainly on one variety for its red wines - Baga. The word means berry, which aptly describes this small, dark, thick-skinned grape. As a consequence of the high ratio of skin to flesh, Bairrada's red wines tend to be impenetrably deep in colour and are almost undrinkably tannic and astringent in their youth, taking on a bitter chocolate character with age. Producers have been experimenting with ways to produce softer wines. Large producers such as Caves Alianáa make a good range of accessible red and white Bairrada.

The vineyards of southern Portugal are dominated by the red Castel‹o Frances grape that changes its name to Jo‹o de Santarem, Periquita or Piriquita, depending on where it is grown. It also produces a wide range of wines that start life with a firm, raspberry character and take on a tar-like quality with age. In the naturally irrigated, high-yield vineyards of the Ribatejo and coastal Estremadura regions of Portugal, Castel‹o Frances provides the fresh, sappy backbone for some good value-for-money reds such as JP Tinto, Leziria, Ramada and the recently launched Alta Mesa, all of which retail at about the £3 mark.

These wines also have fresh, clean tasting white stablemates. Quinta de Pancas, a judicious blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Periquita and the white Quinta de Dom Carlos made from the crisp, appley Arinto are both worth looking at.

The Alentejo in Portugal's deep south is red wine country par excellence. Here the Castel‹o Frances grape grows alongside other highly-regarded red varieties such as Trincadeira and Arag¢nez (alias the Douro's Tinta Roriz). Among the best wines from this rapidly developing region are: d'Avillez and José Sousa from José Maria da Fonseca; Sogrape's Vinho do Monte; Tinta do Anfora from JP Vinhos; and Espor‹o, a ripe, minty red made by Australian David Baverstock.

But Castelão Frances is most at home on the sandy plains of the Setúbal peninsula, just south of Lisbon. Antonio and Domingos Soares Franco head an extensive experimental vineyard there and Domingos is so convinced by the character and quality of Castelão Frances and other indigenous Portuguese grapes that he is progressively digging up small plots of Cabernet and Chardonnay planted over the last 20 years.

Portugal's wine-makers are understandably proud of their heritage and their native grapes should stand them in good stead for the future.