MOLI VIEW™

In the world of wine snobbery, port isn't taken very seriously. It's an after-dinner drink looked down on as an indulgence of old biddies. This probably has something to do with its roots as a British bastard child of necessity. After the 17th century French trade embargo stopped the flow of beloved wines and brandy to the motherland, England had to look to Spain and Portugal for supplies. A few British families (mostly Scottish) settled in the Douro Valley and tried to turn newly purchased vineyards into a money-making production.

But the first order of business was how to get the wines back to Britain unspoiled. They experimented and finally found that the best bet for the vino to survive the arduous voyage by sea from the city of Oporto to London was to add a bucket or two of cognac to the barrels to stabilize the wines, and then pour the stuff into glass bottles for transport. Obviously, the city of origin also gave the wines the name they have today, oporto, or in English, port.

Wine is big business for the Douro Valley, with about 33,000 growers, though the sale of table wines (10 percent white, and 90 percent red) is more lucrative today than the traditional port wines.

The quintas or long-standing family wineries I visited ran quite the gamut. We reached the rustic Symington Estate by old-fashioned train, then had a typical Portuguese lunch of ham and melon followed by bacalhau (cream of cod fish) cooked by the household staff in a family villa that was abandoned for the winter. Later, we stopped in at the super-sleek Sandeman's facility, with its flat-screen TVs flashing an orientation movie (and weirdly, a logo of a man in a black cape that was very Phantom of the Opera). I really enjoyed tasting the different ports and trying to wrap my mind around the complexities of this historic elixir.

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