Port Wine: Portugal’s Douro Valley & the History of Port

Date: June 13, 2011

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Port is a fortified wine from the remote vineyards in Portugal’s Douro Valley. Here, in the Douro Valley, time has almost stood still. You will not find the latest wine making techniques and fancy equipment. Instead, you will find a wine industry much the way it was over a hundred years ago. Yet, in spite of it, or because of it, vintage Port is one of the world’s greatest wines.

Find Bargains on Vintage Port

Port takes its name from the city of Oporto that is situated at the mouth of the 560-mile long Rio Douro or River of Gold. Although many port-style wines are made around the world – most notably Australia, South Africa and the United States – the strict usage of the terms Port or Porto refer only to wines produced in Portugal. It is these wines that we will explore here.

The History of Port
The history of Port begins in the 17th-century. The Portuguese of course, had been making wine for hundreds of years since the Romans introduced wine to the Iberian Peninsula in the first century B.C. And they were making quite a bit of it. By the beginning of the 17th-century, they were shipping as many as 1,200,000 cases of wine down the Douro River to Oporto each year. From there it was sold throughout Portugal, to the Dutch, and to the British. But it was the geopolitics of Europe in the middle of the 17th-century, that caused the British to develop Portuguese wine into port.

Source: http://www.intowine.com/port.html

Clark Wine Center was built in 2003 by Hong Kong-based Yats International Leisure Philippines to become the largest wine shop in Philippines supplying Asia’s wine lovers with fine vintage wines at attractive prices.  Today, this wine shop in Clark Philippines offers over 2000 selections of fine wines from all major wine regions in the world.  As a leading wine supplier in Philippines, Pampanga’s Clark Wine Center offers an incomparable breadth of vintages, wines from back vintages spanning over 50 years.  Clark Wine Center is located in Pampanga Clark Freeport Zone adjacent to Angeles City, just 25 minutes from Subic and 45 minutes from Manila.

Wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone, Loire, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Alsace, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, Chile and Argentina etc. are well represented in this Clark Wine Shop.

For more information, email Wine@Yats-International.com or visit http://www.ClarkWineCenter.com