Royal Oporto

Royal Oporto is not an estate, which is worth clearing up first, because everything about the name and the label invites you to assume it is. Royal Oporto is a brand, and it belongs to Real Companhia Velha, which is the oldest wine company in Portugal.

The company was created by royal charter on 10 September 1756, by King José I under his prime minister the Marquês de Pombal, as the Companhia Geral da Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro. Its job was to bring order to a Port trade that had been wrecked by adulteration and by collapsing exports to England. Between 1758 and 1761 it carried out the Pombaline demarcation of the Douro, which is why the Douro is the oldest demarcated and regulated wine region in the world. The company financed the blasting of the Cachão da Valeira so that boats could reach the upper river, a job that took ten years, and it founded the naval and commercial academy in Porto that became the university. In 1799 Port accounted for more than half of all Portuguese exports.

The name Royal Oporto is simply the English translation of the company's first commercial title, Real Companhia dos Vinhos do Porto. English merchants in the city knew the firm as the Royal Oporto Wine Company, the short name stuck, and it became the company's main Port brand in English-speaking markets. That history is the reason a Portuguese company has an English-looking name on the label.

Real Companhia Velha has been run by the Silva Reis family since 1960. It owns five quintas in the Alto Douro Vinhateiro, the vineyard landscape UNESCO listed in 2001: Quinta das Carvalhas, Quinta de Cidrô, Quinta dos Aciprestes, Quinta do Casal da Granja and Quinta do Síbio, totalling 557 hectares of its own vineyard. The Port ages in wood in the company's lodges at Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto, where the maritime climate does the slow oxidative work that turns a young Port tawny.

The Royal Oporto range goes a good deal further up than people assume: White, Extra Dry White, Rosé, Ruby, Tawny, Late Bottled Vintage, ten, twenty and forty year old tawnies, and Colheita. So this is a producer of both the serious and the accessible, and what reaches the UK at our end of the range is the accessible part.

Two of them do completely different jobs.

The Extra Dry White Port is the one I push hardest, and it is the reason this producer is worth knowing at all. The fruit comes from the Alijó plateau at Quinta do Casal da Granja, off old parcels where more than twenty white varieties grow mixed together in the same vineyard. It ferments in temperature-controlled stainless steel in contact with the skins, and the grape spirit only goes in at the very end of fermentation when there is almost no sugar left, which is what makes it genuinely dry rather than merely less sweet. It then spends 18 months in oak vats.

The Colheita is the other end of the range. A Colheita is a single-vintage tawny that does all its ageing in cask, and the IVDP requires a minimum of seven years in wood before bottling. It is not a Vintage Port and it does not want a cellar.