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Douro table wine 2003 – a steal?

The port business, or as those who run it still quaintly call it, 'the port wine trade', is doing brilliantly well compared to the poor old sherry business, but is so dominated by a handful of people based in Oporto (many of them called Symington) that those of us in the outside world tend not to hear too much about the machinations within it.

 

But port politics are a nightmare, with zealously guarded vested interests on either side of a great divide: basically Douro Valley smallholder and the bureaucrats who rule him versus cosmopolitan port shipper. The 2003 harvest...