This is the second lecture in regards to the Douro Valley by the good viticulturist António Magalhães. Today’s theme goes beneath the floor — actually. After exploring the local weather in our first session, we flip to the second pillar of the area’s terroir: its soil.
A Soil Made by Hand
When you stroll via a winery within the Douro Valley, take a second to look down. You see the sluggish artistry of nature, which over tens of millions of years created the schist beneath your ft, and the tireless toil of generations who remodeled it into residing soil the place vines can thrive.
The Douro’s deep valleys had been carved over millennia by the river and its tributaries. On these steep slopes, the native soils, referred to as leptosols, are little greater than a palm’s depth of earth resting on arduous schist. Left untouched, they might by no means have sustained flourishing vines.
But within the Douro, individuals refused to just accept nature’s limits. Over the course of centuries, they created anthrosols — soils made by human fingers. The locals name the act saibraragronomists silver: it means breaking rock to create soil the place vineyards can develop.
The {photograph} reveals that the schist bedrock seems brittle and simply damaged. Above it lies the soil created by human labor. Look intently, and you’ll see the vine roots reaching down, looking for that final drop of water that retains them alive via the scorching summer season warmth.
The picture illustrates the phrases of the Marquis of Villa Maior, from his 1875 treatise, Practical Viticulture:
“The longevity of the Douro and Burgundy vines is due to the extraordinary development of their roots, favored by the nature of the subsoil.”
Breaking Rock to Grow Life
Until the late nineteenth century, silver was finished with nothing greater than pickaxes and iron bars. In the twentieth century, dynamite was launched, adopted later by bulldozers and hydraulic excavators. Yet the objective remained the identical: to provide every vine at the least a meter and a half of soil depth.
The schist fractures virtually vertically, permitting roots to slide deep between its plates. There, the vine finds not abundance however stability: lower than 1.5 p.c natural matter, but completely aerated and wealthy in minerals. These fractured layers additionally guarantee glorious drainage, carrying away extra rainwater whereas retaining simply sufficient moisture for the vines to endure the lengthy dry season. It is a poor soil that yields noble fruit — a reminder that in wine, maybe as in life, battle builds character.
Stones and Gravel
Kneel in a Douro winery and also you’ll see a glittering mosaic of crushed stone and gravel. To outsiders, it seems barren; to the vines, it’s paradise.
In 1947, agronomist Álvaro Moreira da Fonseca, who devised the Douro’s winery classification, ranked soils by their gravel content material. His creed, easy and enduring, may be expressed in phrases worthy of being carved in stone: “Vines thrive on stony ground.”
The gravel performs alchemy with the weather — reflecting daylight by day, releasing warmth by night time, regulating the vine’s rhythm. It shops heat, tempers vigor, and transforms shortage into depth.
Counting by the Thousands
António says that “The poorer the soil, the closer the vines.” Douro farmers compensate for the soil’s low fertility by planting vines at increased densities. Each vine produces modestly, however collectively they create abundance. Instead of counting hectares, growers converse of 1000’s — teams of a thousand vines.
After the phylloxera epidemic, the rebuilt terraces — socalcos — reached a density of 6.5 milheiros per hectare, sufficient to make each meter of stone wall worthwhile.
Sculpting the Mountain
Rain, the identical drive that helped carve the Douro, additionally threatens to destroy it. The answer lies in constructing terraces to stop soil from sliding away. During the surribathe stones delivered to the floor are eliminated and reused to construct the winery partitions. This operation, known as clears stonesis a apply that makes the back-breaking labor of silver extra rewarding.
Some of the terraces devastated by phylloxera had been by no means replanted. Many house owners, overcome with despair, deserted the area to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Others selected to begin anew, replanting vines on gentler slopes with extra forgiving soils and milder climates.
These deserted terraces, referred to as mortorieshave been reclaimed by the Mediterranean forest. Their stone partitions, now entwined with wild vegetation, stand as silent witnesses to a tragic chapter within the Douro’s historical past.
The oldest terraces, constructed after phylloxera, had been supported by dry-stone partitions, feats of stability and sweetness the place every stone rests “one upon two.” In the Sixties, as labor grew to become scarce and tractors arrived, new earth-banked terraces (landings), depicted beneath, took their place — sensible however much less swish.
At the flip of this century, António Magalhães and David Guimaraens, the pinnacle winemaker of Taylor’s Fladgate, mixed the great thing about the outdated dry-stone terraces with the practicality of the fashionable earth-banked ones. Inspired by California’s Benziger Family Winery, they constructed slim terraces, simply 1.5 meters extensive, every with a single vine row and a mild 3 p.c slope to empty rainwater safely. Precision-leveled by laser, this innovation protects in opposition to erosion whereas preserving the Douro’s swish geometry.
Root and Rock
The phylloxera plague that ravaged European vineyards within the late nineteenth century arrived on the Douro in 1863-64.
Salvation solely got here after Jules-Émile Planchon, a French botanist, and Charles Valentine Riley, an American entomologist, found that grafting European grapevines (Vitis vinifera) onto American rootstocks may save the vines.
One such rootstock, Rupestris du Lot, thrived on the Douro’s poor, dry, schistous hillsides.
It appears to facilitate potassium absorption. This mineral helps regulate the opening and shutting of tiny pores on leaves, known as stomata, which management transpiration and CO₂ uptake — each important to photosynthesis.
For a long time, the Rupestris du Lot anchored the valley’s post-phylloxera vineyards, its deep-seeking roots echoing the surriba’s function: to attach life to stone. Even as newer, extra productive hybrids changed it, António continues to reward its quiet virtues — longevity, restraint, and resilience — the very qualities that outline the Douro itself.
Granite Wineries
The granite mills of the Douro are among the many most enduring symbols of the area’s winemaking heritage. Their coarse surfaces assist regulate temperature throughout fermentation and impart a tactile connection to the land — the feeling of grape skins and should mingling with the mineral essence of granite itself.
For centuries, blocks of rock had been quarried from locations like Vila Pouca de Aguiar, Portugal’s self-proclaimed “granite capital,” the place the stone’s density permits it to be minimize into massive rectangular slabs.
António concludes his lecture with poetic phrases: “In the Douro where I grew up, the grapes journey from rock to rock — ripening in the heat of schist and fermenting in cool granite lagares.”
What to Visit
The prepare journey from Pinhão to Pocinho presents a geology lesson. Along the slopes that flank the railway, you see the leptosol with its skinny layer of soil above the mother or father rock.
The artwork of constructing dry stone partitions is fantastically defined on the Wine Museum in São João da Pesqueira, a city whose historic middle additionally deserves exploration. The go to whets the urge for food for lunch at Toca da Raposa, in Ervedosa do Douro, about 8 kilometers away alongside the National Road 222, heading towards the mouth of the Torto River — one other magical tributary that shapes the wines of the Douro, alongside the Pinhão River. In the summer season, you can too guide an unforgettable picnic on the Foz Torto property with our buddy Abílio Tavares da Silva.
António recommends studying “Taste the Limestone: A Geologist Wanders Through the World of Wine,” by Alex Maltman. You’ll return house with a deeper understanding of soils and their decisive position in defining terroirs internationally.
