In the Douro, Change Is Eternal

The terroir and the market demand ingenuity and flexibility from the region’s vintners in exchange for mere survival. Here are the latest curveballs being thrown.

Trying to describe the Douro is like trying to describe outer space.

People project personal visions, paradigms, and whimsies onto the Douro; they tend to associate it with big human emotions, and even grander ideas of what we have done, and are yet capable of doing.

The Douro is vast, mysterious, dangerous, lovely. It holds so many secrets from the past, and hopes for the future.

The Douro as Land

The Douro region is defined by the river of the same name, which originates in Soria, Spain, and flows through Spain, then Portugal, before emptying out into the Atlantic Ocean. It is also defined by the human ingenuity and vision that has shaped it since 1756, when it was officially demarcated, and thus became one of the oldest delimited wine regions in existence.

The terraces scattered around the steep slopes going down to the Douro river, on which the vines have flourished for centuries, were excavated by hand. The stunning gravity-defying beauty of the Douro was recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Those vines, which include around 100 indigenous grapes, have historically been used to make port wine. The climate is bone dry, the ancient schist and granite-dominated soil is famously poor—Rupert Symington of Symington Family Estates told me on a recent visit to several of his Quintas, that it contains less than 1% organic matter. The summers are insufferably hot (with temperatures frequently topping 100 degrees), and the winters cold enough to occasionally frost, but not much colder than that.

For centuries, the Douro was celebrated for its port, but a complex cocktail of climatic, economic and market factors are changing that.

The Douro as a Wine Region

While locals have been producing garagiste-style still wine for local consumption for more than 2,000 years in the Douro, the first dry table wine emerged “officially” in 1952, with the debut of Barca Velha, made with local grapes, but in the style that honored the wines of Bordeaux.

(Technically, still wine came before Port. Port wine was likely “invented” when wine merchants were forced to innovate when shipping their still wines from Porto to England in the 1600s. But as far as the world’s palate is concerned, Port came first).

But in the decades that followed that initial debut, still wine from the Douro elbowed its way onto the world’s table, and in recent decades it has become ever-more important to winemakers’ bottom lines.

The Douro as a Marketable Concept

The vast majority of Port producers have launched a line of still premium wines. It’s a nod to changing tastes and changing economic realities.

How many 25-year-olds do you know who drink Port?

Absent the extremely knowledgable wine savant, delightful oddball, or generational member of the 1%, sipping a glass of tawny while nibbling on a wee wedge of Camembert is one of the last things anyone under the age of 55 will be found doing on their average Saturday night.

(Unless they’re filming a Boomer parody for TikTok… perhaps Port as an ironic sip could be the new hotness?)

Sales of Port broadly have plummeted by almost one-third since 2000. The category of Port is becoming increasingly dependent on appealing to the economy’s upper echelon.

“People talk too much about age,” says Rupert Symington, the fifth generation leader of Symington Family Estates, which has multiple (Graham’s, Cockburn, Warre, Dow’s) historic Port houses under its umbrella, along with several newer (including Bomfim and Sol) still and sparkling wine brands. “The people who want our top Ports come in all ages. What they have in common is the money to spend on Port.”

And spend they must, with prices per bottle typically of new releases hovering in the four digit range, and special and library releases commonly fetching tens of thousands of dollars per bottle.

Clearly, not everyone can shell out this kind of cash, so the premium production is limited, and at this point, half of the wines emerging from the Douro are still table wines, an unthinkable phenomena even a few decades ago.

This year, the Interprofessional Council of the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto slashed the authorized amount of Port wine for the 2025 harvest by 16%, and the lowest figure so far this millennium.

The Douro in an Economic Crunch

Meanwhile, the Douro’s steep vineyards and poor soils, and the traditional method of Port production requires a much higher level of boots on the ground, and higher costs than any other region in the world.

“The Douro is the most expensive place in the world to produce wine,” Symington explains, explaining that the steep, terraced vineyards make mechanical harvesting impossible. “The cost of labor has gone up astronomically, and at the same time, all of the local people are moving out to the cities. It’s an epic brain drain. It’s a serious problem, not just for us, but for the entire region.”

Indeed, while the costs of farming and production have remained the same or gone up slightly in recent years, so has the cost of hiring people, (The minimum wage was raised 6.1% this year).

“The labor issue has been one we’ve been dealing with decades, really,” Symington says. “We have always, thankfully, been very tech-forward. My cousin Charles [the winemaker] has worked to invent several machines that not only cut labor costs, but also improve the taste of the wine when we do side-by-side blind comparisons with members of the trade.”

The Symingtons were the first to bring auto-vinification to the Douro, the first to begin using automated lagares with rubber “feet” in place of stomping human foot during the fermentation process, and now they are experimenting with robots in the vineyard, and replanting vineyards to accommodate ’bot harvesters.