Wine - The Douro region

In my experience, there isn't a wine growing region anywhere on the planet to touch the Douro. It's pretty enough on the

Spanish side of the border, but as the river starts to tumble towards the sea, flanked on either side by baked, steep terraced vineyards, it's truly majestic.

It also has a genuinely timeless feel to it, which is good for the tourists, but not, alas, so good for the wine industry.

Fewer and fewer youngsters want to stay in the Douro and grow grapes, lured instead by the bright lights of Lisbon and Porto.

You can understand why. Those steep slopes can't be harvested mechanically, and picking by hand is tiring, hot and costly. The poverty of the "soils" (in fact, little more than broken up schistose rock) might be great at limiting vine yields, but it also prevents more or less anything else from growing at all.

For grape varieties like Touriga Nacional, Touriga Francesa, Tinta Cao and Tinta Roriz (a relative of Spanish Tempranillo) the poor soils (that reflect back the sun onto the vines), and the baking heat give rich, ripe, spicy wines that are the staple of the port trade. Young-drinking rubies tend to be grown further down the valley towards Porto, while the more powerful, tannic and long-lived grapes used in vintage port, for instance, come from the Cima Corgo - the Upper Corgo east of Pinhão.

The past 15 years have seen the growers in the Douro working hard to develop a table wine industry, too. There are very few whites, and of the reds, the quality veers wildly from

the fantastic to the rustic.

Fruit quality is generally good, but tannins are another matter. While the best wines have firm, ripe tannins, the poor examples are coarse and tough, in a style that, for the most part, disappeared 20 years ago. This remains a region to watch, with some fabulous wines, but across-the-board progress remains slow.