The wine that came in from the cold

The revival of Dão, Salazar’s wine

There’s a particular scene that as a wine bore caught my eye in the film version of Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It’s the part where the Richard Burton character, Leamus, has been invited for supper by a colleague at the library where he works called Nan Perry played by Claire Bloom. She's a very forward (I imagine for the time) and naive communist. She barely knows him and yet she invites him back to her flat. Leftie floozy! I say flat but it's actually more of a bedsit and gives you some insight into the cramped and pinched lives that would have been the norm for lower-middle class Londoners. The film was made in 1965 but it has the feel of a Patrick Hamilton novel. It’s a long way from Swinging London or James Bond. 

A ray of southern warmth is provided by a bottle of wine that she unveils with a little ceremony: "Dinner will be served at eight with a Portuguese wine spelled D-A-O with a twiddle over the 'A' and pronounced ‘dang’. . . I made Hungarian goulash I thought it would be tactful to serve a communist food with totalitarian wine."

She’s referring to the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar who ruled Portugal from 1932 until his death in 1968. It’s probably a little inaccurate, however, to refer to his authoritarian conservative regime, Estado Novo, as totalitarian. Estado novo, new state, is a little misleading too as what he really wanted was to keep modernity in all its forms out of Portugal. When he came to power in the 1930s, the country looked like it would descend into the chaos that would engulf first Spain and then the rest of Europe, but instead Salazar’s rule seemed to send the Portuguese to sleep. Many of its brightest and most creative left for France or America while the country slipped into a slumber. 

Salazar owed his remarkable longevity partly to being on our side in the Cold War (not unlike the ex-Nazi working for the British secret service in the film.) Many people nowadays portray him as a fascist and though you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of the secret police, the Estado Novo lacked the glamorisation of violence that charaterised Mussolini and Franco. Following Salazar’s death, Portugal had a socialist revolution in 1975 but it was an extraordinarily peaceful affair. My parents were in the Algarve at the time and it barely interrupted their holiday. At a dinner party recently, I met a couple of young Portuguese left wing idealists who felt that it was disappointingly bloodless. The remnants of the old regime could have done with a purge, apparently. Rather embarrassingly for such progressive Portuguese types, in 2007 when their country ran its version of the BBC’s Great Britains which was won by Winston Churchill called Os Grandes Portugueses, it was won by Salazar (below).

His ambivalent shadow still hangs over the country, not least in the wines. Salazar was the son of a small farmer from the Dão region in Northern Portugal so would have known the wine intimately. It’s the home of Portugal’s most famous red grape touriga nacional and at one point in the early 20th century was famous for the quality of its wine. Salazar, an economist by training, decided that what Dão needed was a dose of central planning. He instituted a system where by law all grapes had to be sold to co-operatives to make the wine. There would be no private Dão wines. Hungary would have had a similar system as did many other wine regions in authoritarian hands.

It was designed to protect peasant small holders who made up the majority of grapegrowers. They would get a fixed price for their grapes but the system meant there was no incentive to quality. All the grapes were just tipped in together and vinified on a massive scale without much care. This odd system continued under the socialists and only ended when Portugal joined the EEC (as it was then) in 1986. In his excellent book on new wave Portuguese wine Foot Trodden Simon Woolf writes:

“By then, the damage had been done and Dão was in doldrums. Look no further than the pronouncements of wine writers at the time. Jancis Robinson recalls that prior to the 1990s, Dão was producing ‘some of the toughest, hollowest, most uncharming wines in the world.’ Michael Broadbent described the special taste of Dão wines as ‘goaty’.”

English wine writer and Portuguese expert Charles Metcalfe, however, tells a different story. He mentioned trying a supermarket Dão from the 80s recently and was amazed how it aged. He went on to say that many Dãos from the Salazar period were still going strong. There was an article on Jancis Robinson’s website in 2009 where Julia Harding was impressed with various Dão wines dating back to the 1950s. According to Harding, not all winemaking in the region was haphazard during the co-op years. There was Centro de Estudos Vitivinícolas de Nelas (CEN) which researched viticulture and winemaking presided over by a man called Cardoso de Vilhena who was, according to one person at that tasting, “the most brilliant oenologist of Portugal and my reference for all time”.

Like Metcalfe, one of the wines that impressed Harding was an everyday offering: a 1982 Grão Vasco Garrafeira. This was one of the big brands, made in vast quantities and still going strong today. I remember picking up supermarket Dão garrafeira (similar to a Spanish reserva) wines in the late ‘90s for about £4. They were pale red with age, oaky and mellow, with a very lively acidity. 

I don't think you can buy old-school Dão anymore. All the co-ops are in private hands and like many regions in the 00s, there was a trend for new oak and darker colour but the wines always remained distinctive with usually quite forceful tannins, somewhat reminiscent of Barolo, and a distinctive perfumed quality. At its best Dão makes Portugal’s answer to Burgundy. Over the years I’ve enjoyed wines from Quinta dos Roques, Quinta da Falorca and Niepoort’s Dao Rotulo. This last one always seemed to be sold with years on it; handy for a wine that just gets better with age. Nowadays the pendulum seems to be swinging away from dark wines back towards freshness though not as far as the pale reds of old. 

When I watched the Le Carré film, I giggled at Bloom’s pronunciation of Dão: ‘dang’. I've always pronounced it to rhyme with cow. Well, it turns out the idealistic Communist was not far off. I asked my progressive Portuguese acquaintances the correct way to say Dão and it's "downg" pronounced in a nasal fashion. So now you know.