PINHAO, Portugal — When Dominic Symington looks out from his shady hillside garden across the vineyards of Portugal’s majestic Douro Valley, he sees centuries of family and European history.
British families like the Symingtons have been at the heart of the northern Portuguese region’s port wine trade for generations. Dominic Symington, one of seven in the family wine business, has an ancestor — Walter Maynard — who shipped port to Britain in 1652.
Port, Symington says in an impeccable British accent, is a “way of life” for his family and tens of thousands of farmers along the River Douro.
The syrupy after-dinner drink has long been a hallmark European product, like Parma ham, Greek feta or French Champagne. The business has withstood foreign and domestic wars, economic depressions and a 19th-century plant blight that wiped out many of the continent’s vineyards.
The 21st century is no less challenging. Shifting consumer fashions and financial crises in places where port has always sold well have crunched earnings and cast a cloud over the trade’s future. That is forcing producers to step outside their comfort zones and explore distant new markets.
After a decade of slow but steady decline, annual revenue last year was about 12 percent lower than in 2000, at nearly $500 million, and 12 million fewer bottles were sold compared with that year, according to the Association of Port Wine Companies, an industry group.
“The trade is clearly going through a difficult time,” said the 55-year-old Symington, who describes himself as Portuguese “born and bred.”
Port producers are trying to put the brakes on their slide, and some 60 miles downriver from Symington’s riverside house at Pinhao there’s a glimpse of where part of the solution could lie.
Part of the trade’s problem is that about 80 percent of production has traditionally been swallowed up by five main markets — France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and the United States. Britain, the historic main market for port, ranks sixth these days.
The worst financial crisis in living memory has helped squash sales in those countries. For many consumers, port is a luxury they can do without. Added to that, lifestyle changes have to some degree made the high-calorie drink unfashionable as consumers watch their waistlines.
In the past century Symington Family Estates exported port to about 20 countries. Now, it’s selling in more than 80. The new destinations include cash-rich emerging markets where the producers are coaxing Brazilians, Russians, Chinese and Angolans to put port on the table.
The signs are promising. Port wine sales to Brazil rose more than 31 percent in the first half of this year, to about $3.5 million, making it a Top 10 importer. It’s not enough to take up the slack, though.
Producers also are pushing port in gimmicky new cocktails, such as white port with tonic water, a twist of lemon and ice, that might appeal to a younger crowd. It’s a novelty the trade’s forebears might have found sacrilegious.
Symington, though, says it’s an inevitable development. Port has long banked on its prestige and aristocratic conventions, such as always passing the port to the left at formal dinner parties, but now it needs to shed its stuffy image, he says.
“We have to de-formalize port,” said Symington.
British exporters built up the local wine trade after Britain went to war with France in 1678, losing access to French wines. The story goes that the British added grape brandy to the Douro wine to prevent it spoiling at sea. That made it 20 percent proof — almost twice as potent as table wine — and especially sweet by halting fermentation while the wine is still fruity.
Port has also drawn distinction from its upmarket price.
The lower-grade ports, called ruby, tawny and latebottled vintage, usually carry a price tag of around $14 to $35.
A “vintage” port, so called because it came from a grape harvest that was exceptionally good, carries a heftier charge. Something like the Symingtons’ prize-winning 2007 version costs about $140. Port gets better with age, and its price climbs with the years. Taylor’s Scion, from 1855, goes for about $3,475 a bottle.
The Douro Valley is one of Europe’s smartest addresses for wine and one of the world’s oldest demarcated wine regions, dating from a 1756 law. Its steep slopes, slate terrain and sunny summers provide ideal conditions.
The vineyard estates, called “quintas,” are reached by narrow, winding roads that trace the contours of the Rio Douro, the Iberian peninsula’s thirdlongest river which enters from Spain, where it is known as the Duero.
Some 30,000 farmers along the valley use generations of know-how to produce wine that runs like a thread through local history. They rely on the lump sum from the harvest to help see them through the year.
Times for these workers are suddenly hard. The government has raised taxes and cut welfare entitlements to save money as part of an approximately $110 billion bailout earlier this year that spared Portugal from national bankruptcy.
At the same time, authorities have slashed permitted wine production levels this year by more than 20 percent. That measure aims to get rid of stocks left over as sales fell and that could drive the retail price lower.
Business, Pages 78 on 10/30/2011