Wine tourism is changing Porto – but at least the drinks are world-class

For the wine lover, Porto offers one of the world’s most romantic views. Standing on the quay by the broad Douro river, with the majestic iron-latticework of the late 19th-century Dom Luís I bridge on your left, a scan of Villa Nova de Gaia on the opposite bank takes in some of the biggest names in the venerable fortified wine to which the city gave its name: Calém, Sandeman, Noval, Taylor’s, Graham’s, the words formed by enormous white letters on the terracotta-tiled roofs of their ageing cellars.

When I first came to Porto around the turn of the millennium, I probably wasn’t the only tourist spending my time filling rolls of film with minor variations of this endlessly absorbing view. But, as I wandered around the maze of atmospherically dilapidated streets, it sometimes felt that way. Fast forward 25 years to this summer and I was one of what felt like thousands of people jostling to find the right angle for a selfie before settling down in one of the many new, busy waterfront bars and restaurants.

Like many other European cities, Porto has been transformed by tourism over the past couple of decades, and port has played a significant role, with the shippers converting their cellars, AKA lodges, into slick visitor centres, luxury hotels (the Yeatman, owned by the Fladgate Partnership, the owners of Taylor’s) or boutique hostels (the Sandeman House), and, in 2020, opening (Fladgate again) a vast wine-themed museum and hospitality complex, World of Wine.

The focus on wine tourism, which has also begun to flow 60 miles upstream to the spectacular terraced vineyards of the Douro valley where the grapes are grown and wines are made, is just part of the port trade’s plan for surviving a precipitous drop in demand for its fortified wines (30% since 2000). Other strategies include persuading remaining customers to buy higher-priced ports that offer a better return for producers, and an accelerating switch to making unfortified, lower-alcohol Douro table wines.

None of this is straightforward. The steep rise in visitors to Porto and the Douro has led to concerns that, like Barcelona , they will end up with unaffordable housing and stressed public services. And thanks largely to antiquated regulations which dictate the price and quantity of grapes made into port each year, but leave table wine grapes (which now account for almost half of all wine made in the valley) to be sold on the open market, many of the network of small, often subsistence farmers that give the Douro’s geography and wines its character are struggling to make a living. Some vineyards are being abandoned, while the local youth head to the city to look for work, often in the tourist trade.

Curiously, in what can feel like a time of crisis, the quality of the wines in the Douro, both fortified and unfortified, has never been better. And it’s there, in what are some of the best-value fine wines in the world, that hope for the future of this most romantic of wine regions is most in evidence.

Six great wines from the Douro