25 Years of UNESCO: How Wine Tourism Transformed Portugal’s Douro Valley

Portugal’s Douro Valley is marking 25 years as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and new figures demonstrate just how significant wine tourism has become to the region’s economy. When the Alto Douro Wine Region was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in December 2001, the designation recognised a cultural landscape shaped by centuries of viticulture, […] The post 25 Years of UNESCO: How Wine Tourism Transformed Portugal’s Douro Valley appeared first on Liz Palmer .

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Oh, that view from Vallado

I’ve visited Quinta do Vallado only twice, but both visits left an impression. They’re a fine producer of both Port as well as unfortified Douro wines and in fact they make one of the few VVOP wines that I’ve tasted. This is, “Very, Very, Old Port” which is, as the name implies, quite old and in this specific instance, the wine has a blend that’s 44% from 100+ year-old wine and includes a scoop of 1888 wine (akin to El Grifo in Lanzarote.) Then there’s another 40% that’s ‘merely’ 80 […] For full access, please log in or purchase a subscription.

The broad view for Wines of Portugal

The first part of my trip to Porto for Alive Taste this summer was, to put it mildly, mind-blowingly hot–and this is from someone who lives on the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula. Thankfully, the initial day only saw brief kisses of the actually heat outside as I quickly hopped from plane to waiting car to hotel to bus and eventually finding my way to the “World of Wine” center created by Taylor Fladgate. Abbreviated as WOW, it absolutely lives up to its name with an intricate complex of […] For full access, please log in or purchase a subscription.

Reinventing the wine

Unlike most other alcohols, selling wine over the last half century has required not just branding, but a narrative, and despite being very aware of this, wine has never actually managed to fully control its own narrative. You can see this when it was all fun and games being an excellent part of the Mediterranean Diet. Back then, wine was viewed as the ‘healthy’ booze for a healthy lifestyle. But once the bottomless mouth holes on The Socials, along with the some of the most corrupt/boring politicians in recent history started decrying wine (as well as alcohol in general) as ‘evil’, that whole narrative unraveled like silk lingerie, machine washed on the cotton cycle. Thus, despite wine never being better made as well as very accessible to all levels of income, consumption of wine has been in a freefall ever since we emerged from the darkest days of the pandemic.…

25 Years of UNESCO: How Wine Tourism Transformed Portugal’s Douro Valley

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Oh, that view from Vallado

The broad view for Wines of Portugal

Reinventing the wine