The Douro valley is one of the very few wine regions where foot treading is still practised, to the delight of photographers and visitors from tamer wine regions, but machinery usually does the job and, as labour costs soar and the valley is gradually depopulated, much ingenuity has resulted in mechanical substitutions for foot treading. To preserve the grapes' natural sweetness, grape spirit is added at quite an early point in the fermentation process to stun the yeasts, which means that as much colour as possible must be extracted before that point. The aim of the port producer is to make a wine that is as deeply coloured and sweet as possible. Touriga Nacional is generally regarded as the top quality port vine, supplemented with Tinta Amarela, Tinta Barroca, Touriga Franca, Tinta Cão and Tinta Roriz (the Tempranillo of Spain). But then port, like sherry, champagne and madeira, is essentially a blended wine and many of the greatest ports I have ever tasted were made decades before the term 'varietal' was even coined. It has taken the port producers much longer than most to understand, or even identify, the 80-plus vine varieties responsible for their amazingly concentrated, deep-coloured product. The land is so inhospitable here, with only a dusting of topsoil, that many a vine sends it roots yards down into deep fissures in the schist, apparently the only possible route to the water necessary for growth. Some very promising vineyards are not that far downstream of the point at which the Duero of Spain becomes the Douro of Portugal. The best port country is almost 100 miles (160 km) upstream of Oporto, well away from the rainy coast. The steep, rocky, necessarily terraced vineyards of the Douro were long since mapped according to the concentration of the wine they are able to produce, and grape payments decided accordingly. Ever since the late 17th century, when British merchants scoured friendly Portugal for goods that would replace heavily taxed items from France, much of the commercial end of the port wine trade has been in British hands, which has made for an even more delicate relationship between growers and bottlers than in most wine regions. The peasant farmers who inhabit this wild, silent valley in which only the vine will grow, rely for their livelihood almost entirely on the port shippers, the un-Portuguese likes of Cockburn, Croft, Dow, Graham, Sandeman, Taylor and Warre, based half a day's drive downstream in Oporto – or rather in lodges on the quayside of Vila Nova de Gaia across the river from it. Although there are wines made outside Portugal to taste like port (see below), there is nowhere in the wine world at all like the Douro Valley in northern Portugal, the true home of port and any wine like it.
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