Douro Valley: Learning to Love the Weeds
Region: Douro Valley, Portugal
Climate: Hot, dry summers and cold winters, with strong variation across the valley.
Grape Varieties: Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Cão and many others. We had two weeks to spare, laptops to work from, and no particularly sophisticated plan.
So we booked an Airbnb in the Douro Valley.
Our host was a local woman who had returned to a small vineyard that had belonged to her family. Like many plots in the region, the previous generation had eventually left it behind. There wasn't enough money in it.
She had come back to try something different.
Rather than focusing on Port, she was producing table wine and slowly turning the family vineyard towards biodynamic farming.
Until then, we'd mostly thought vineyards were supposed to look tidy. Perfect rows of vines, bare earth underneath, nothing growing where it shouldn't be.
Hers didn't.
Grasses, herbs, and plants grew between the vines. And over many conversations, she started teaching us why they were there.
Keeping that vegetation isn't as simple as just letting everything grow wild. Too much growth and humidity around the grapes can encourage fungal disease. So she cut and managed what grew between the vines, while avoiding the spraying and intensive interventions common in conventional vineyards.
The goal was a vineyard that could function more like an ecosystem.
And rebuilding one takes years.
She talked to us about soil, insects, herbs, trees, moisture and disease about younger winemakers who had inherited knowledge about producing wine, but not necessarily about farming in this way.
Slowly, the way we looked at vineyards changed.
Bare earth stopped looking quite so beautiful.
We started looking between the rows instead.
At the end of our stay, she disappeared and came back with a bottle.
It had no label. It was one of her own Ports, around 30 years old, made during her earlier experiments before she turned her attention towards table wine.
Of course we drank it.
It was delicious.
But somehow the thing we remember most from those two weeks isn't a 30-year-old Port.
It's the weeds.
