We liked Porto very much. Above is a photo taken from the opposite bank of the Douro looking towards Porto. The river bank on which I am standing while taking this photo, is the bank where all the famous Port cellars are located, Sandeman etc. I enjoyed a 30 year old porto at a small bar. On the Porto side of the river is the old town. It is an area with a lot of pleasant restaurants. We enjoyed a delightful Dorade later that evening accompanied by a vino verde.

Porto is obviously a city that has seen better times. Indeed I suspect it was once a rich town. This steel girder bridge was erected at the beginning of the twentieth century. An ambitious and expensive project at that time. Today there are quite a lot of buildings which could do with a substantial renovation.




What I suspect has happened is that the town did extremely well out of it’s port at one time, but the fashion of fortified wines has passed and the town has not developed new sources of wealth.

Of course port was very much an English drink. Many of the famous brands bear English names. The drink was really boosted through the slave trade. The British ships coming back from America would drop off, in Liverpool, the raw materials produced by the American slave plantations. A few drunken nights in Liverpool and the ship headed off to Porto to pick up the necessary alcohol. The crews on the slave ships were not a happy lot. Inevitably the nature of the trade led to many psychological disorders in the crew members. It was well known in the trade that the crew on the English ships would get drunk on lashings of port before gang raping the slaves, both sexes. The inconvenience was that they passed on their venereal diseases, syphilis mainly. The market became very depressed for English slaves. Obviously the American plantation owners didn’t want to catch English crabs from their slaves. So the City of London seeing that profits were declining decided to pull out and came up with the Wilberforce line of spin.

This unfortunate connection with the English seems to have rendered the inhabitants of Porto rather lazy. They seem to think that they can just get away with marketing spin, cost control and delocalisation. They really have the English disease of never making the effort to improve the product. The time of fortified wines has passed. In the days of long unhealthy sea voyages and drunken crew it was a good solution. But today we prefer natural wine, lighter and more energising to the taste buds. Come on Porto, get rid of those dishonouring English names, build on the brilliant natural wines of the Douro valley. Cast off your infamous brush with the Anglo Saxons, Europe welcomes you.