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Portuguese
wines in the UK marketplace (This article is modified from a piece
I wrote for Harpers Wine and
Spirits Weekly, the leading UK wine trade magazine, in April 2002)
The good news? According to Nick Oakley, of Oakley Wine Agencies, ‘2001 is the best commercial vintage I’ve experienced in 10 years of working with Portuguese wines’. The bad news? ‘For the first time, we have the volume, quality and price, but we don’t have the interest from the supermarkets’. Oakley uses a surfing analogy to illustrate the problem. ‘Four years ago people were clamouring for Portuguese wine, but two successive poor vintages in terms of quantity, 1997 and 1998, came just at the wrong time: everyone was waiting for the wave that never came. Now it’s hard to get the serious players interested in listing new Portuguese wines.’ He adds, ‘it is frustrating, because we now have the best conditions for a decade. We have the wave but we don’t have the surfers.’ Peter Bright, who has been making wine in Portugal since
1993, agrees that the last couple of years have been ‘very
difficult’ — he has seen listings for his wines come and go. The
problem? ‘Portugal as a brand doesn’t exist: it’s not that
people have a poor opinion of Portuguese wines; they just don’t have
any opinion.’ More positively, Bright feels that Portuguese wines
offer high intrinsic quality and totally different flavours, and while
he can’t see an explosion of sales happening soon, he thinks
Portugal’s best bet is to ‘try to carve out a niche market’. Along similar lines, Robert Boutflower of Laymont & Shaw
is worried that Portugal will always be a small sector. ‘Everyone
had great hopes a few years ago, but they haven’t been realized.
They had their chance and didn’t capitalize on it.’ He explains,
‘Six to eight years ago everyone thought Portuguese wine was the
next big thing, but interest has been dropping off. Everyone was
behind Portuguese wines and supermarkets were listing them. But they
didn’t sell because people didn’t like the style.’ Boutflower
admits that Laymont & Shaw haven’t done as well as they’d
hoped with their Portuguese portfolio. ‘The style of wines that are
successful in Portugal are difficult to translate to the UK market:
they are too Portuguese. They need to vamp up their presentation and
style for the UK.’ Not everyone is glum, though. Danny Cameron, of Raymond
Reynolds, is much more upbeat about the prospects for Portuguese wine
in the UK. In fact, he’s quite buoyant. According to Cameron, ‘the
biggest trend over the last 12 months has been a surge of confidence
among the independent trade. If you go back 12-18 months very few were
listing more than 5 wines: now they are typically listing 8-12 and
they are turning them over.’ He reports that merchants are also
becoming more aware of the qualitative pyramid and are ‘not afraid
to stock wines at the £8-10 and £15 price levels’. As an example
of this growth in confidence he cites Redoma’s Rosé, a pink Douro
wine that sells at £8.99. Last year 500 cases were sold. ‘In the
context of the UK trade this is not a lot, but in the context of a
Portuguese Rosé at £8.99, this exceeded our expectations.’ Cameron
adds, ‘there’s now an acceptance of the idea that Portugal is not
just there to service the trash can.’ Ineed, there does seem to be a
gulf developing with Portuguese wines between the high-end, small
production wines (they’re flourishing) and the high-volume everyday
wines (which are finding it a bit of a struggle). One unquotable source suggested that the supermarket buyers
were to blame for some of the difficult conditions at the volume end
of the market. ‘The problem is trying to get them to look at what
we’ve got. The general trends in the wine market are guiding the
buyers, who are not letting the wines speak for themselves. They are
made to follow the marketing people.’ He added that ‘Waitrose and
Marks and Spencer are the exception: if it’s good quality, they’ll
back it.’ Going
the varietal route? Sogrape’s Miguel Oliveiro Pinto believes that this move to
varietals is important, but more as a learning process. ‘Because of
the past history of Portugal in terms of viticulture, it is important
for producers to learn about the potential of varieties.’ Oliveiro
Pinto adds that ‘a very good blend is probably richer and more
complex than a single varietal. Varietals are a good starting point in
creating the best possible blends in the future.’ Wines
to look out for in the UK marketplace Another high-end Douro wine hoping to make a splash is the
newly released Chryseia 2000, a 50:50 joint venture between Bruno
Prats (of Cos d’Estournel fame) and the Symington family. According
to Paul Symington, the principal behind Chryseia is simply ‘to try
to make a wine that will be seen as one of Portugal’s best’. He
feels that the climate and grape varieties of the Douro are capable of
producing ‘an outstanding wine’. 35 600 bottles of the 2000
vintage have been produced, and rather unusually it will be offered
for sale solely through the Bordeaux Negociants. My verdict? It’s
good, but probably outperformed by several of the new breed of top
Douro wines. According to Ben Campbell Johnston of John E. Fells, it
should cost in the region of £20–25 per bottle. Fells are also
agents for the modern-styled Esporão wines from the Alentejo,
impeccably made by David Baverstock.
Oakley Wine Agencies have a large portfolio of Portuguese
wines, including those of João Portugal Ramos, who is currently
making some impressive, fruit-driven commercial wines. Ramos has
developed a reputation as one of Portugal’s leading consultant
winemakers, but is now concentrating on his own operation at Estremoz
in the Alentejo, and also a promising venture called Falua in the
Ribatejo. Falua is a negociant business, but maintains quality through
long-term contracts with growers. It has the potential to produce the
sorts of quantities that interest the supermarkets (currently half a
million cases), and at the right prices, too. Oakley has just achieved
a listing for two of these wines with Marks & Spencer (Trincadeira
and Aragonez varietals, under the brand name Solorico, each at £4.99).
Laymont & Shaw’s portfolio includes several Portuguese
producers (Spain is their core business), most prominent of which is
probably Luis Pato. In the last 12 months he’s left the Bairrada
appellation in frustration at the bureaucracy, and from now on the
wines will be labelled as Vinha Regional das Beiras. His well-known
single vineyard wines are expensive (retail £16.95), and there’s a
paltry 20 cases of each for the UK. Impressive in the modern style are
the Quinta da Alorna wines from the Ribatejo, which now have a
radically improved packaging. These delicious wines are made in a
soft, concentrated, commercial style and retail for £6.95. Laymont
& Shaw also have great hopes for Pellada, a 100% Tinta Pinheira
from Alvaro Castro in the Dão (£6 retail; independents). They’ve
decided to put a nude on the label for the UK market, because,
according to MD Robert Boutflower, ‘sex sells’. How nude?
Boutflower assures me it will be tasteful: ‘Just a belly button and
half a bosom’. Castro’s other Dão wines, Das Saes and Pellada,
are leading examples of their region. What of Sogrape, Portugal’s largest family-owned wine company? It seems they are pretty far advanced in the process of reinventing themselves as a thoroughly modern producer making wines that the export markets want. Marketing Director Miguel Oliveiro Pinto says that Sogrape have made a conscious decision to change the style of their wines to appeal more to international tastes. New for this year’s tasting was a revamped Reserva range, with a white from the Douro (£5.95) and reds from Dão (£6.95), Douro (£7.99) and Alentejo (£7.45). Whereas Sogrape’s reserva wines were previously made with the specific requirements of the powerful domestic market in mind, the new range has been adjusted ‘to fit the international palate’. According to Oliveiro Pinto, ‘the whites are frutier and fresher, and the reds show more up-front fruit and better integrated oak’. But while there has been a change in style, Sogrape are not considering using international varieties. ‘Portuguese grape varieties are the soul of our product’, he emphasizes. Also on show will be the latest vintages of the Regional range, which was launched early last year. These come in just under the £5 price point, and represent four different DOCs: Douro, Dão, Alentejo and Vinho Verde. Quantities range from 50 000–150 000 cases, with up to half for export markets. These aim to represent the very best each region can do at this price point. Future
trends There is some good news amid the realism that cracking the
volume end of the market is a rather elusive goal. Robert Boutflower
comments that ‘Portuguese producers are now listening to what we are
asking for. In the past they’ve made nice wines but they’ve not
been commercial enough. We’re asking producers to soften up their
wines for general drinking while maintaining their Portuguese
identity.’ Peter Bright is also positive that ‘the quality is
there’. It is promising that the overheated domestic market is
showing signs of cooling off: ‘Grape prices are coming down, which
should make the wines more competitive in export markets’. Everyone seems to agree that quality is on the up. João
Costa claims that there has been an ‘enormous increase in quality in
the last five years’, an opinion echoed by Miguel Oliveiro Pinto,
who thinks there has been a tremendous improvement in viticulture,
vinification and also packaging. He adds that while the concentration
by most producers on indigenous varieties may be a disadvantage in the
short term, in the medium term ‘there will be a point of
differentiation of Portuguese
wines that will be important in foreign markets.’ Costa agrees that
one of the advantages of Portuguese wines is that they are different.
‘Consumers could become fed up with international grape varieties,
and if and when they grow bored with them, they’ll turn to
Portuguese wines’. He thinks that the current difficulties
Portuguese wines are experiencing are not unique to Portugal.
‘Everyone in the old world is up against a lot of competition from
the new world wines, which are often produced by big private companies
with large marketing budgets. In the old world many companies are
still family owned and can’t compete on the same level’. For the
future, he believes Portugal is ‘well placed to offer a third way
between the old world and the new.’
For the sake of diversity, I hope he is right. Portuguese wine
producers have jumped through all the hoops that the export markets
have set them: let’s hope they can also woo the consumers… Producer profiles from the Portuguese trade tasting and my recent Douro trip will be appearing over the next few weeks. June 2002 |
April’s
Portuguese annual trade tasting, held at the Royal Horticultural Halls
in London, was the biggest yet, with more than 600 wines from 45
different producers. But it seems that the fortunes of Portuguese
wines in the UK marketplace over the last 12 months have been
decidedly mixed. 
In
the UK, Raymond Reynolds have been at the vanguard of the resurgence
of interest in high-end Portuguese wines, with recent initiatives such
as their Bairrada club (a special offer of hard-to get Bairrada wines
pitched at independents). This year sees the launch of the new
flagship Douro wine from Dirk Niepoort, the 1999 Batuta. The April
trade fair was the first showing of the finished wine in the UK,
although a few readers may have been fortunate to taste an
under-the-counter cask sample at last May’s LIWSF. Batuta is an
opaque, dense blend of old vine Tinta Amarela, Tinta Roriz and Touriga
Franca, and only 3000 bottles of this mind-blowing stuff were made.
Priced at £45, there are just 20 six-packs for the UK. The importance
of Batuta, though, lies in its role as a figurehead for the new
portfolio of Douro table wines that Dirk Niepoort is developing. Those
who miss out will find the 1999 vintage of Redoma almost as
impressive, but it’s still made in small quantities, with 900
bottles for the UK (retail £24.99). The two other reds in the
Niepoort portfolio are the rare Charme (aiming at an elegant style,
and foot-trodden with the stems) and Quinta da Napoles. Expect to see
a lot more on wineanorak.com about Dirk’s wines in the coming weeks:
as I write I’ve just returned from an exciting trip to the Douro
looking at the revolution in top quality table wines that is taking
place there, and his wines are leading the field.