The First Family of Port
The men and women behind Taylor Fladgate have been making world-class port since 1692, but in many ways they're just getting started. At a marvelous lunch in their new winery, the latest generation discusses crises and triumphs.
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Rushton was more right than he realized. The sun may have set on England's overseas possessions, but the English families who once dominated the port wine trade still do so today, buying up rival firms and estates at a furious clip. Vargellas, which Taylor Fladgate calls "the jewel in the crown," is at the center of a new surge of empire building.
Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman has been a family business for over 300 years. The current chairman of the company, Alistair Robertson, traces his ancestry to neither of the now extinct Taylor or Fladgate lines but is related by marriage to the last of the Yeatmans. Robertson was more or less blackmailed into the job by his aunt Beryl, who was married to Richard Yeatman. When Yeatman died in 1966, she told her nephew, "'Come and take over or I sell up,'" he recalls.
Robertson, who was in the wine trade in England at the time, returned to the Portuguese city of Oporto, his childhood home, with his wife, Gillyane. (She is the mastermind behind Taylor Fladgate's recent venture into hotel keeping; their Vintage House is a luxurious property an hour and a half from Oporto, near the town of Pinhão.) In the beginning, the couple lived very modestly in the old stone city of Oporto as they subsidized the struggling wine business. But the port itself served as their inspiration.
Port is arguably one of the greatest wines in the world. It's also the most successful survivor of the (mostly) sweet fortified wines created in southern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for a largely British audience. (The term fortified refers to the fact that such wines are reinforced with the addition of a neutral-spirit brandy during fermentation.)
Wood-aged, or tawny, ports resemble their cousins sherry, Madeira, Marsala and Málaga; by contrast, bottle-aged, or ruby, ports (including vintage ports) offer what Robertson calls "an explosion of primary fruit." The exuberant Taylor port style has proven quite successful. In fact, wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr., gave the 1992 Taylor Fladgate a perfect, 100-point score.
But for all its glory, port in many ways defies commercial logic. After all, who today would choose to create a sweet, highly alcoholic wine that requires decades to mature and throws such a heavy sediment that it must be decanted before serving?
To Robertson this simply made for an interesting challenge, prompting him to develop a new wine: Late Bottled Vintage port. LBV is made the same way as regular vintage port and like the traditional version, comes from the harvest of a single year. The difference is that Late Bottled Vintage is aged in wood longer and sold ready to drink. Robertson even went one step further and filtered the wine so it wouldn't need to be decanted.
The launch of LBV in 1970 was controversial. Taylor Fladgate's rivals thought it would confuse buyers and destroy the market for the more expensive classic vintage ports. "The attitude was, 'This young pup's going to muck up vintage port,' Robertson recalls, 'but at least he's going to start by mucking up Taylor's.'" Instead, LBV was a great success, and the firm was reinvigorated. Today the company earns about $50 million a year.
A family firm has its advantages. For starters, there's the personal contact with the customers. Or, as Robertson says, "We're the ones that do the foot slog--the tastings and promotions." A family-run business also streamlines decision making; the principals are always close at hand. However, when you drop in on a Robertson gathering, as I did recently, you're more likely to find them indulging in flights of conversational fantasy than plotting corporate strategy.
The Robertsons and their clan regularly make the three-hour drive from Vila Nova de Gaia (across the river from Oporto) to their estate house in Vargellas. They receive friends and guests there too (as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney once visited). Alistair and Gillyane offered me a lift, although I was obliged to share my seat with Jake, their elderly and rather smelly but much loved pointer.
Vargellas has been in the family since 1893 but became accessible by road only in the early 1970s. Until then everything, and everyone, came and went by the single-track railway celebrated by Rushton, and the terraced vineyards that surround the house could be reached only by foot or by mule. Electricity arrived in 1972. That first year, however, the Robertsons sentimentally stuck with paraffin lamps in the house. Says Gillyane, "We thought we could have the electricity and just keep the lights turned off." This resolve quickly faded; today the house has the usual modern conveniences.
The building, however, remains surrounded by olive and almond trees, which provide ingredients for family dinners. There's also a profusion of wild violets, and, as often happens with wild plants growing in vineyards, their faint but haunting scent can be detected in the estate's wine.
One afternoon last fall, three generations fit comfortably around the dining room table, enjoying the commanding view of the rugged Douro River valley while lunching on regional favorites like caldo verde, a bracing kale soup, followed by roast pork with prunes, port and anchovies.
Among those present was Natasha Bridge, who, at 38, is the eldest of Robertson's daughters. She trained at the University of California at Davis, the famed winemaking school, and is already an accomplished taster. In attendance as well was her husband, Adrian Bridge, also 38, who will become Taylor Fladgate's chairman when Robertson steps down this year. Bridge, who's been the company's managing director since 1999, is a former military man. In fact, he is a holder of the Sword of Honor, given each year to the top cadet at Sandhurst (Britain's equivalent of West Point).
It was Bridge who bore the brunt of a recent crisis and spearheaded its resolution. Early last year, torrential winter rains caused landslides that demolished one of the lodges (maturation cellars) in Vila Nova. Local people fetched jugs to scoop up what they could of the 550,000 liters of vintage port (the 1998 and 1999 Taylor Fladgate wines and the equally revered Taylor-owned Fonseca) that ran through the streets. But there were some undamaged vats, and Bridge's team managed to rescue a fair amount of wine; the company was up and running the next day.
In September, a new winery began operation not far from Vargellas, with futuristic technology such as robotic machinery that mimics foot treading (still compulsory for vintage port). At the same time, Bridge oversaw the acquisition of the venerable port houses of Croft and Delaforce, which made Taylor Fladgate the second largest port exporter to the United States, after Symington.
The family maintains that the real secret of its success is to be found in its vineyards in the Douro rather than in its business headquarters near Oporto. Like most other port shippers, they are based in Vila Nova, which, with Oporto, makes up a single municipality that is the second largest city in Portugal. It's also the country's hardest working. A Portuguese joke has it that Oporto is where the money is made and Lisbon, the capital, is where it's spent.
Taylor Fladgate recently purchased four new properties in northern Portugal, increasing the number of vines planted by almost half. Says Bridge, "We now make twice as much port from our own estates as we did just three years ago." But, he notes, unlike in a large corporation, Taylor Fladgate has no shareholders to answer to. Alistair Robertson makes it clear he considers this a good thing: "Vineyards take God knows how long to get any return. But this is where the quality comes from, and this is where we've invested."
Patrick Matthews is the author of Real Wine: The Rediscovery of Natural Winemaking.
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