Port was invented as a substitute for French wine during a trade war. It is now a Strand tapas bar with a 4.6.
Port is a British invention, in the sense that matters. The Portuguese made the wine. The English made it into port.
And they did it because they were at war with France and could not get claret.
The trade war
England drank French wine. Then, through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, England and France spent an enormous amount of time at war with each other, and punitive tariffs went onto French wine, and the supply became first expensive and then politically embarrassing.
So English merchants went to Portugal – an old ally – and started buying wine from the Douro instead.
The problem was the journey. The wine did not survive the sea voyage. So they fortified it: brandy was added, which halted the fermentation, left residual sugar, and pushed the alcohol high enough that the wine arrived intact.
The result was sweet, strong, stable, and entirely accidental, and the English took to it immediately, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703 locked in preferential duties, and within a generation port was the drink of the English gentleman and claret was faintly suspect.
The gout
The consequence is well documented and is not a joke.
Eighteenth-century English gentlemen drank port in quantities that modern medicine regards with alarm – bottles, daily, for decades – and the resulting epidemic of gout is one of the best-attested public health phenomena of the Georgian era. It appears in the caricatures. It appears in the letters. William Pitt the Younger was reportedly advised by his doctor to drink a bottle of port a day, took the advice with enthusiasm, and died at forty-six.
The Prat’s medical desk notes that the national drink of the English ruling class was adopted because of a war, fortified because of a boat, and consumed in quantities that visibly crippled the people drinking it, and that they carried on regardless for about a hundred and fifty years.
The bar
Seventeen hundred reviews and a 4.6, which is a strong number on a real sample – one of the better-rated venues in this entire survey.
Port, obviously, and a serious list of it. But also tapas, and Portuguese and Spanish wine, and a room that is dark and busy and gets genuinely loud, and prices at twenty to sixty pounds that are fair for what arrives.
Ask them for a port you have not heard of. They will enjoy it. Nobody ever does.
Vintage port, and the patience of it
A declared vintage port is bottled young and then left, in the bottle, for decades. It throws a heavy sediment. It must be decanted. It is not ready to drink until roughly the point at which the person who bought it has stopped thinking about it.
Which means the entire product is a bet on the future – on the bottle surviving, on the cellar staying cool, on somebody remembering it is there, and on the drinker still being alive.
The traditional English response was to lay down a case at the birth of a child and open it at their twenty-first, which is either the most charming custom in the country or a two-decade financial instrument denominated in fortified wine, and the Prat’s view is that it is both and that this is why it worked.
Verdict
Excellent, unpretentious, seriously stocked, and named after a drink that exists only because England fell out with France and could not get a bottle across the Bay of Biscay without brandy in it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
