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Portuguese table wines are a mystery -- to most non-Portuguese anyway. This is a great shame, as Portugal has many unique attributes as a wine producer, not least its dazzling range of indigenous grape varieties, many of them, such as Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Trincadeira and Castelao Frances among many reds and Arinto, Bical and Fernao Pires among whites, with their own powerful and attractive identities. This is in stark contrast to Spain, which has almost five times as much land in vineyards as Portugal and yet has drawn on a much narrower range of vine varieties.
But while Spanish wine exports are booming internationally and there is a sense that Spanish wine's combination of predominantly Mediterranean climate with European sensibility is the flavor of the year, Portugal has been struggling to make its presence felt on wine lists and shelves outside Portugal and its old colonies Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Goa and Macau.
In Britain, the promiscuously open but penny-pinching wine market I know best, Portugal's prospects have long been blighted by many professional wine buyers' insistence that Portuguese wine, like Eastern European wine, had to be cheap. Last year, Portugal's table wine exports to the United Kingdom rose by 10 percent in volume -- even if they are still tiny compared to the ocean of wines from Gallo and Blossom Hill (a Diageo brand created for export) that California ships over the Atlantic.
More in Bay Area
Even in the United States, with its significant Portuguese-extraction populations on the East and West coasts, Portugal's table wines have been almost invisible -- until recently. In the Bay Area, an increasing number of retailers and restaurateurs are putting Portuguese bottles on their shelves and lists; one brand, Cortes de Cima Family Vineyards in Alentejo, has a strong local presence thanks to its ownership by Mill Valley native Carrie Jorgensen and her husband, Hans.
So how does an underappreciated wine-producing country improve its position in an important wine market? I have spent 30 years observing, and being a target of, generic wine export campaigns. The very first wine tasting I attended was an attempt in London's Canada House by Ontario wine producers to penetrate the British market. They still haven't managed it. A substantial proportion of my bulging mailbag (rapidly being replaced by my overloaded electronic mailbox) is made up of attempts to convince me that Country X or Region Y is making superb wines -- really -- or that their latest generic advertising campaign is not a colossal waste of money.
Over the years I have come to the conclusion that only two things are essential for a country or region to succeed at exporting. First, there has to be at least one or preferably several seriously committed individuals in the importing country driving the campaign who are fully supported by the exporters. This sounds obvious, but in my experience, too many of those representing their country's wines abroad are either civil servants simply hanging on to their jobs (don't get me started on Italy's presence in the United Kingdom) or external public relations people who don't really understand or care about the wine market and fritter away the budget on cute little gestures that have nothing to do with introducing wine drinkers to the wines in question.
The most obvious example of a person who almost single-handedly persuaded the British to drink the wines of the country she was hired to represent was diminutive Hazel Murphy, who in the 1980s, through a combination of lateral thinking, determination and efficiency, turned the British into Australian wine drinkers from a standing start. (My sense is that the tidal wave of California wine exports to Britain has been more the work of individual companies than any generic campaign.)
Ambassadors matter
It is not coincidental in my view that Portuguese wine has started to do so well in Britain now that Fernando Andresen-Guimaraes is Portuguese ambassador to Britain. As a wine writer who goes to far more than my fair share of the hundreds of wine tastings held in London each year, I am rarely aware of a diplomatic presence at any of them. But the Portuguese ambassador seems to be at every one of the many Portuguese wine events held -- whether in the trade office, his residence or on the other side of town. He, unusually, really does seem to care about the reputation of his country's wines.
So what is the second prerequisite of wine export success? This is almost embarrassingly obvious: that the wines really are worth shouting about. Hideous amounts of money have been spent on advertising the name Bordeaux for example -- all over the world -- with campaigns that have had to be acceptable to producers of both red and white wines, in all languages and cultures and are therefore so diluted as to be ineffectually vapid.
But in my view, the money has been wasted, not just because the ads say nothing but also because the product they are advertising has not (so far) been consistent enough to warrant all that expenditure -- money that has come directly from poor, embattled growers' pockets.
Those of us who have been tasting with interest what Portugal has to offer the table wine drinker (as opposed to the Port drinker, who has been fully satisfied for centuries) during the past 10 years or so have noticed an enormous and rapid evolution. Portugal has long had the grape varieties, the huge variety in grape-growing environments (from the Atlantic-washed Minho in the far northwest to the arid Alentejo in the southeast) and the refreshing acidity that its Atlantic coastline confers on the wines.
What it has lacked until recently is vine-growing and winemaking sophistication.
Most white wines were either too thin or not sufficiently refreshing. Dao was hopelessly fruitless. Bairrada was supertannic in a tart fashion. Alentejo wines were too often rustic and/or overripe. The first generation of Douro table wines were extremely exciting but certainly not polished.
Exciting whites
But in the last few years, there has been a sea change. Much to my surprise, one of my favorite wines at last March's Portuguese wine tasting in London, for example, where 60 producers showed more than 700 wines, was a full-bodied white wine, 2004 Esporao Branco Reserva Alentejo, a blend of Antao Vaz, Roupeiro and Arinto that should satisfy any lover of California Chardonnay looking for more zest and interest. Or if you want to be purist and stick to an all-Portuguese white (Esporao's winemaker David Baverstock is Australian by birth -- though hardly by experience anymore), there is the 2005 Bucelas Quinta da Murta, a fine, perfumed, marine-influenced Arinto that retails for even less than the Esporao.
Dao's new, fruity, interesting manifestation could be seen from producer Caves Alianca. Its 2003 Quinta de Garrida Dao Touriga Nacional is rather less expensive than the equivalent wines from the giant Sogrape stable and follows in the footsteps of the admirable Quinta dos Roques and sister property Quinta das Maias.
The wines of the wizard of the Bairrada region (who has chosen to desert the appellation for the looser and larger Beiras), Luis Pato, were not present, but I was excited to taste the new reds and whites of his daughter Filipa Pato.
By far the greatest concentration of seriously exciting wines came from the Douro Valley, and here there was a notable contrast between the finesse apparent in the best recent offerings from specialists such as CARM, Dirk Niepoort, Pintas, Quinta do Passadouro and Quinta do Tedo and the more rustic, though certainly powerful, wines made by some producers whose raison d'etre is Port.
But every wine country needs a calling card, a well-priced brand that is easy to find and in tune with the modern drinker. Joao Portugal Ramos is to be congratulated on its 2004 Marques de Borba Alentejo Tinto, a wine that has consistently offered value and thoroughly Portuguese character.
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