Vinho do Porto

The English word 'port' (for the fortified wine of Portugal) derives directly from Portuguese Porto, the name of Portugal's second-largest city, through the phrase Vinho do Porto (wine of Porto). Porto itself derives from the Latin name Portus Cale — the harbor (portus) of Cale, where Cale was an ancient settlement near the mouth of the Douro River; Portus Cale eventually gave its name not only to the city but, through the provincial name Portucale, to the entire nation of Portugal. The word portus (harbor) comes from Proto-Indo-European *por- or *per- (to lead, to pass), related to Latin porta (gate, door), portare (to carry), and English 'port,' 'portal,' 'transport,' 'export,' 'report,' and 'important' — all words in which something or someone passes through or is carried. Portugal, Porto, and port wine all share the same Latin root: the harbor through which things pass.

Port wine as a distinct category developed in the seventeenth century from the confluence of English commercial demand and Portuguese viticultural geography. The Douro Valley — a dramatic, steep-terraced river valley in northeastern Portugal, with a harsh continental climate, thin schist soils, and an extraordinary concentration of native grape varieties — had produced wine for centuries before it became port. The Methuen Treaty of 1703, negotiated between England and Portugal amid the War of the Spanish Succession, reduced English tariffs on Portuguese wines and Portuguese tariffs on English woolen cloth. The treaty made Portuguese wine commercially competitive with French wine in the English market at a moment when England and France were at war — and it created the conditions for a specifically English demand for Douro wine that drove the development of the port wine style.

The process that created port wine was partly practical and partly accidental. Wine from the Douro had to be transported from the remote valley to the coastal city of Porto (and its sister city Vila Nova de Gaia, on the opposite bank) for shipping, a journey that could take weeks by boat on the Douro or by road over the mountains. Wine spoiled on the journey and during the sea voyage to England. British wine merchants in Porto and the Douro (the 'English Factory' — a trading association established in Porto — included firms like Sandeman, Graham, Taylor, Cockburn, and Warre, many of whose names remain on port labels today) discovered that adding a measured quantity of grape spirit (aguardente) to the fermenting wine — a process called fortification — preserved the wine, stopped the fermentation before all the sugar had been converted to alcohol, and created a wine that was stable enough for transport and storage. The result was sweeter, stronger, and longer-lived than ordinary wine.

Port wine entered English drinking culture in the early eighteenth century and became, over the course of that century, the defining drink of the British upper and professional classes. It displaced claret (Bordeaux) as the prestige wine precisely because the Anglo-French wars of the period made French wine both expensive and, symbolically, unpatriotic. The 'port and claret' division in eighteenth-century British culture tracked political and social alignment: Tories and High Churchmen drank port; Whigs and cosmopolitans drank claret. Dr. Johnson famously declared claret 'the liquor for boys' and port 'for men.' The port-drinking culture of Georgian and Victorian Britain — the decanter passed clockwise around the table after dinner, the club cellar, the Vintage port that required a decade of cellaring before drinking — created the elaborate ritual vocabulary that still surrounds port: vintage, tawny, ruby, LBV (late-bottled vintage), colheita, lodge.