The joy of Portuguese wines

There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew who he was. An accomplished sailor from his RNVR days during the war, he was always a stalwart of nautical good and goodery – and he knew a very great deal about wine, especially port. A Texan can extract five syllables from Goddam: Go-o-o-day-um. John could do as well with port. Po-o-o-o-rt. It was a deeply reassuring sound. Whatever was going wrong with the world, as long as John was in his place, saluting the port, nothing could be as bad as it seemed.

His death was appropriate. At one of his favourite club tables, he suddenly fell forward, and that was that. If only this had happened 20 years later.

Port came to mind recently and with it, Portugal: England’s oldest ally since the Treaty of Windsor in 1386. The Portuguese have much in common with the English, both being maritime nations, both ready to yield to the temptations of imperialism. In that respect, the English were more fortunate. Portugal was regularly menaced by Spain, a stronger neighbour with a common boundary. We had our moat: the Channel. Although the Portuguese did well out of Brazil, they usually bit off more empire than they could chew.

But in the 18th century, links between Britain and Portugal were reaffirmed. As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, an embargo was placed on French wine, which especially affected claret. That must have been exceedingly distressing to the oenophiles of the day, for the French were getting better and better at making wine: cf Pepys’s ‘Ho Bryan’.