![]() ![]() In turn the first 30 years of the 18th century saw an unprecedented expansion of wine making in the Douro Valley. At first opening only transport offices, they soon were risking capital to buy the standing harvest. Many of the British wine trade, most often Scotsmen, had founded branches of their companies there. This paved the way for the enormous expansion of port trade in the 18th and 19th-centuries.Äuoro RiverBy this time, a good number of port houses were already well established in Oporto. In 1703, Britain and Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty providing for, among other things, bolts of cloth from England for pipes of wine from Portugal. Britain and France were once again on opposing sides. The opening of the 18th-century brought with it the War of Spanish Succession. As a result, sales fluctuated with the warming and cooling of Britain's relations with France. Any popularity it enjoyed was due more to its availability than anything else. This early wine from Oporto was not highly praised back in London. In order to stabilize them for shipment to England, merchants added "a bucket or two" of brandy to the barrels of wine before sending them off. Traveling inland along the Douro River, they found darker and more astringent red wines in contrast to those they had seen near the coast. So if the British wanted good wine, they were going to have to oversee its production themselves. Wine making in Portugal had not become the serious endeavor it was in France. ![]() Unfortunately, wines of the quality they were looking for were not readily available. Britain has been the traditional trading partner and ally of Portugal since 1373 when an agreement was signed pledging "perpetual friendship." It was natural then, that the British wine merchants turned to Portugal to find an alternative to the French wines they preferred. This created an instant shortage of wine. In 1678 Britain declared war on France and blockaded French ports. But it was the geopolitics of Europe in the middle of the 17th-century, that caused the British to develop Portuguese wine into port. From there it was sold throughout Portugal, to the Dutch, and to the British. By the beginning of the 17th-century, they were shipping as many as 1,200,000 cases of wine down the Douro River to Oporto each year. The Portuguese of course, had been making wine for hundreds of years since the Romans introduced wine to the Iberian Peninsula in the first century B.C. The history of Port begins in the 17th-century. ![]() Visiting wine country? Get the Priority Wine Pass: 250 California Wineries, 1 Amazing Year Worth of Tastings, Only $45. ![]()
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