No wine region is crying too loudly about how disastrous 2004 was for them (they never do) but perhaps the most dramatic reversal of fortune was in Portugal’s Douro where what looked like disaster for 2004 port and Douro table wine was saved by late sunshine. Although the first four months of 2004 were dangerously dry, leaving vines ill-equipped to deal with the usual summer heat, August turned out to be the wettest for more than a century. A total of 77mm fell in August and more unsettled weather in early September threatened grapes that were unusually unripe for the time of...