One of the most rare and storied wine traditions in the world was nearly lost to autocracy. This is the story of how a public project in Portugal saved it.
It was the morning of April 25, 1974. All was quiet at the Largo do Carmo, a small square near the center of Barrio Alto in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. At the northeast corner of the plaza, armed sentries stood outside the Quartel do Carmo, guarding the seat of power of Western Europe’s most isolated autocracy.
Suddenly, music began to play, and a revolution was launched.
Using Portugal’s entry for the Eurovision song contest as a signal, members of a liberal military faction known as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) materialized like apparitions, surrounding the Estado Novo regime’s headquarters. Marcelo Caetano, recent successor to infamous dictator Antonio de Oliviera Salazar, immediately ceded power.
Lisbon and greater Portugal erupted in celebration. Young men and women, all of whom had grown up under the heavy hand of authoritarianism, climbed up on military tanks and stuck flowers in the rifle barrels of MFA service members. The Carnation Revolution had appeared from nowhere; freedom had dawned on the nation.
After the MFA handed authority to the people, the long and arduous process of healing began. Portugal ranked dead last in 1970s Western Europe in key social metrics like per capita income and literacy rate. The infant mortality rate was also an astonishingly high 55.5 per thousand.
As the country had slipped further into the decadent abyss of Estado Novo rule, it wasn’t just the citizenry that was endangered: Key cultural traditions dating back centuries were nearly lost into the black hole of Salazar’s dictatorship. This is the story of how one of those Portuguese treasures – one of the planet’s most rare and storied wines – was saved from extinction.
It’s also a testament to the potential of well-designed public projects, a crucially important element of government we continually resist (yet ironically need) here in America.
Project for the People
My cab driver was lost, and I was running out of time.
Winding through a maze of side streets in a modern residential development, the navigation apps on our smartphones kept leading us to dead ends. My guide for the morning had given me explicit instructions: Meet at the Casal de Manteiga at 8 a.m. If you are 10 minutes late, the tour is canceled.
Frantically searching for an open road, my cabbie was finally able to turn eastward. With only minutes left to spare, the winery was now in view, and we were driving along the perimeter of the only 25 hectares left of commercially grown Carcavelos grapes in the world.
I greeted my guide at the entrance to the Casal de Manteiga, a property that she explained was once owned by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, Marquis de Pombal in the 18th century. The renowned nobleman served as the de facto ruler of Portugal, playing the central leadership role in rebuilding Lisbon following the catastrophic earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of the city.*
An advocate for Carcavelos wine, Carvalho developed vineyards on the land, which offers a captivating view of the nearby Atlantic Ocean. The property’s unique soil consistency of clay and limestone coupled with its breezy seaside location help to give grape varietals that go into the rich, caramel-flavored Carcavelos (i.e., Arinto, Boal, and Galego Dourado) a singular quality. Environmental factors, however, are only part of the complex equation that makes this wine so special.
Inside the facility of Casal de Manteiga, a former dairy operation in the era of Carvalho, barrels are stacked neatly toward the ceiling. Carcavelos, one of Portugal’s four major fortified wines along with Porto, Madeira, and Moscatel de Setúbal, is aged there for a minimum of five years. It’s infused with a grape-flavored Portuguese brandy made at a nearby distillery, raising its alcohol by volume (ABV) to 18-20 percent.
Along with locally grown grapes and Lisbon-area brandy, there’s another layer of localism to Carcavelos – the wine tradition was literally saved by the Portuguese people. In 1983, less than a decade after the Carnation Revolution, the vineyard was ordered by the Portuguese government to be protected and replanted, saving the precious soil from the looming urban development that we had just driven through. A public project was born, eventually turning into the government-funded commercial operation of Carcavelos Wine Villa Oeiras.
Today, public servants paid by Portuguese tax dollars work the land and make the wine, carrying on a tradition that echoes across centuries.
* The earthquake that rocked Lisbon in 1755 is considered one of the darkest days in European history. For more on how it hastened the decline of the Portuguese colonial empire, read my feature blog “Lisbon: A Warning to the Free World.” A link is available at the end of this article.
Wine of Emperors, Presidents, and Baronets
In a letter dated August 1790 addressed to wine merchant James Brown, late U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, a renegade co-drafter of the Declaration of Independence, wrote this regarding his affinity for Carcavelos:
“I would prefer good Lisbon; next to that, Sherry, next to that Carcavallo (sic),” Jefferson as quoted as writing in the bookThomas Jefferson on Wine by late University of Mississippi adjunct professor John Hailman, “but still a good quality of the latter would be preferable to an indifferent quality of the former.”
Jefferson wasn’t the only historical figure of the 18th century to prefer a good glass of Carcavelos. Sir Walter Scott, the famed Scottish historian and novelist and 1st Baronet, also loved the wine, which was gifted to the imperial court of the Chinese Qing Dynasty by the Marquis de Pombal in 1752. To further underline its popularity during the heyday of Carvalho, Christie’s of London, the world’s leading auction house, featured bottles of Carcavelos at its inaugural wine auction in 1769.
At the end of the tour, our guide drove me in her personal vehicle to the Villa Oeiras’ nearby cellar, located in the Marques de Pombal’s recently renovated palace. I sampled each of the three wines available on the Villa Oeiras website. Folks, there’s a damn good reason historical figures like Jefferson and Scott preferred Carcavelos above all the rest.
Some wine connoisseurs liken the taste to caramel and butterscotch. Others detect elements of honey and pecan. I tend to agree with all of their observations; like fine food prepared with a symphony of blended ingredients, Carcavelos manages to deliver a sophisticated succession of perfectly timed tastes in each sip. It is nothing short of splendid, and the experts at Wine Enthusiast recently awarded 94 points to Villa Oeiras’ 15-year bottle.
Quality alone makes Carcavelos elite, but more exists in the glass than just palatable excellence. As we drank and listened to our guide talk of her grandfather, a humble farmer who lived nearby, making Carcavelos in traditional methods handed down from his ancestors, it became clear that what really separates this wine.
Once you open a bottle of Carcavelos, you step into a story, a sweeping epic of a former empire that lost itself to the horrors of autocracy only to find its way back through the power of the collective. This wine is an emblem, a hopeful beacon to those who still recognize and cherish the benefits of living in a free society.
In short, the historical journey of the Carcavelos tradition is metaphorical to the soul of the Portuguese people.
Worth Every Penny
While the Marquis de Pombal oversaw the golden age of Carcavelos in the 18th century, port wine traces its origins all the way back to the Age of Discovery. Our tour guide explained that Portuguese mariners ran into a problem as they crisscrossed the globe during the 15th century: By the time they made port in a faraway land, the wine onboard their vessels had spoiled. To solve the problem, they began fortifying it with spirits like the brandy found in Villa Oeiras’ Carcavelos.
Dating well before Portugal’s preeminence at the beginning of the colonial period, winemaking in the greater Lisbon area goes back 2,000 years. It spans the rule of Julius Caesar’s Rome and later the North African Moors. If it weren’t for responsible government intervention in post-autocratic Portugal, the Carcavelos tradition, a critically important part of the region’s history, would have likely been lost to time.
The Villa Oeiras project makes me think back to my college years and an oft-referenced pyramid model that I believe is not only relevant to personal progression but also national health.
American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is staple in collegiate psychology courses here in the U.S. According to the theory, humans strive during their lifetimes to advance from the bottom of the pyramid, summarized as physiological needs like air and water, all the way to the top and fifth-highest rung, termed self-actualization. The pinnacle is characterized by realizing your potential and reaching self-fulfillment.
While it’s not an exact correlation in terms of verbiage, I believe the health of a country can also be determined by referencing Maslow’s pyramid. For example, the suffocating regime of the authoritarian Estado Novo left the Portuguese citizenry at the most basic level of needs, as indicated by the astronomical infant mortality rate in the 1970s. Five decades later, the existence of Villa Oeiras is symbolic of a country seeking self-actualization: The willingness of citizens to fund a historical preservation project is a significant indicator of national health.
Here in America, we often brace at taxation, and sometimes for good reason. We are, after all, a nation founded by rebels with an inborn distrust for government. Returning to Maslow’s model, though, it’s hard to make the argument that the U.S. is currently at the top of the pyramid.
With crumbling infrastructure and rising inequality, we are at the fourth rung – searching for our self-esteem. America is a young nation in relation to countries like Portugal, and centuries-old traditions like Carcavelos wine are few and far between. However, there are key areas where, at minimum, a favorable diversion of tax revenue would create positive, unifying change.
One is the protection and responsible development of federal public lands, which I wrote about in a previous feature article “Out West: The Fight to Protect Our Federal Public Lands.” While our national history might be brief, the human history in the States dates back millennia. Sites like North Alabama’s little-known Welsh Caves could be inexpensively developed into Indigenous interpretative centers, providing educational and cultural enrichment to the public. Infrastructure is another area in desperate need of state and federal attention.
Rebuilding our dilapidated roads and bridges, updating our vulnerable power grids, and creating innovative transportation (i.e., rail systems similar to the ones found on the Continent) and energy solutions for the future would not only be an obvious win for commuters, travelers, and the environment but also the economy: Like the public servants who work the land at Villa Oeiras, public road projects and energy initiatives offer the promise of gainful employment that benefits the country at large.
Well-designed, well-intentioned public initiatives continue to pay dividends long after they are put into motion. Whether some of us realize it or not, Americans today are the benefactors of immense federal projects like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and President Dwight Eisenhower’s National System of Interstate and Defense Highways of the 1950s. Both of these examples were funded by the taxpayer, came at critical national inflection points, and proved to be worth every penny.
Just like in the decades of FDR and Eisenhower, the U.S. has arrived at another crossroads. We can either continue to allow government to divide us or open-mindedly consider ways to utilize it for the common good.
I believe the good folks at Villa Oeiras, faithful guardians of a national tradition beloved by historical legends, would drink to the latter.
Related Content
– Click to read my feature article “Lisbon: A Warning to the Free World” about how the rise and fall of the Portuguese Empire is a cautionary tale for the modern West.
– Click to read my feature article “Tangier: City of Spies” about Tangier’s historical connections to espionage.
– Click to watch my high-definition video of the Jerónimos Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.