The decline of English civilisation is witnessed in the declining sales of vintage port, a drink that can be served only on quintessentially English occasions - at a meet of foxhounds, for instance, or a college dessert - and which, when mature, tastes of Elgar, Dickens and tweed. Port was created for the English market, and many of the best quintas bear the names of English families and English firms. But as English nationality evaporates, so does the old viticulture of the Douro: the quintas crumble, the vineyards die, and the old stone lagares, in which the grapes are trodden, and in which they ferment, slowly lose their colour, their aroma and their use.
However, the Portuguese have woken up to the problem, reclaiming the broken amphitheatres of vines along the Douro, and processing the grapes as table wine. It was that most English of Portuguese poets - Fernando Pessoa - who said that the true Portuguese cannot live within the restraints of a single personality, nation or faith. While drinking himself to death in the bars of Lisbon, therefore, Pessoa exhorted his countrymen to become modern, surrealist and adventurous, setting off "in search of a new India which has no spatial existence, in ships made from the stuff of dreams". The result is on offer from Corney & Barrow, in four bottles of dream stuff that will transport you to every corner of Pessoa's imaginary empire.
Although the Quinta de Covela has been in existence since the 16th century, its manor house and chapel lie in ruins. The vineyard has now been replanted with local and global varietals, the Portuguese Touriga Nacional providing the backbone to this kindly and cheerful red. The wine from Chocapalha, in the Estremadura region, north-east of Lisbon, is 100 per cent Touriga Nacional, and provides an excellent benchmark for this remarkable grape. A deep-violet colour, highly perfumed, and with full, soft tannins, the wine still remembers the horny feet that trod it in the lagares, and the French oak barriques in which it afterwards recovered from the ordeal. This is a wine for foot-fetishists, and proved to be the perfect accompaniment to the last fragments of our pig Napoleon - his trotters, as it happened.
The Quinta de Chocapalha's Cabernet Sauvignon has the fruity, rounded taste of that global grape, but trodden by those same feet into a version of the intense local flavour, somewhere between cheese rind and crystallised violet. Back in the Douro region, the pickled feet of port producers have packed as much fruit as it can bear into the Quinta do Vale Dona Maria red, which tastes of all the varietals of the fortified wine while reaching a strength (14.5 per cent) that makes fortification superfluous. A truly stunning drink, which sent us on a passage to India, with Pessoa as guide.
