Creio que nunca, neste blogue, foi publicado um texto em inglês. Mas, desta vez, decido abrir uma exceção. O "Financial Times", um dos melhores jornais do mundo, famoso pela sua infuência nos mercados e na elite das elites, inseriu, no seu número deste fim de semana, um artigo que, muito provavelmente, fará mais pela promoção dos vinhos portugueses no mundo que muitos "roadshows" que por aí se organizam.
A figura central do texto é João de Vallera, o embaixador português junto da corte de St. James. Ler o que sobre a sua ação surge no artigo é, para um velho amigo, um imenso orgulho e, para a sua profissão, que tão maltratada tem sido, uma saudável "vingança":
João de Vallera,
Portuguese ambassador to the UK, and a confirmed enophile. Belgrave Square is
one of London’s smartest addresses, giving its name to Belgravia, the rich
kernel of one of the world’s richest cities. It is not the natural milieu of
scruffy wine writers but, thanks to João de Vallera, the current,
unusually wine-minded Portuguese ambassador to the Court of St James’s, we have
all been trotting along to number 12 Belgrave Square on a regular basis. The
Portuguese embassy is the handsome three-storey stucco mansion on the square’s
northwestern corner (the Spanish ambassador lives on the southwestern corner)
and so far, this year alone, it has been the setting for a Wine Society event
showcasing the wines of Luis Pato; a Baga Friends celebration of the
characteristic grape of the northern wine region of Bairrada; the 10th Wines of
Portugal Awards dinner; and a presentation of the exciting table wines that the
Douro Valley, home of port, is producing.
Tim
Stanley-Clarke, wine trade veteran and UK representative of the Symington port
family, says: “I would put João top of the vinous Richter scale of the
Portuguese ambassadors I have known over the past 30 years. He really loves
wine and knows quite a lot about it.”
Danny
Cameron, the chairman of the association of Portuguese wine importers in the
UK, is another fan. “He has a great sense of humour and a great sense of
humanity. And, above all, he loves good wine. Whenever I have a meeting or
telephone call with him, it’s never completely about the next event, or
whatever else, because he always slips in a comment about something he has
tasted recently, or wants to discuss a particular vintage of something.”
As I settled
in to my seat next to de Vallera at the awards dinner in the frescoed
dining room recently, he said with some pride that the room had recently housed
a catwalk. “There are three areas I take a personal interest in,” he confided.
“Fashion and textiles, tourism, and wine. And I am particularly keen on
combining the last two.” He was then able to quote the number of hotel rooms
occupied by Brits in Portugal last year and, almost, the number of glasses of
wine they had drunk. But it is not as though wine is a particularly important
export from Portugal. The ambassador reeled off statistics about the country’s
exports of machinery, oil, vehicles – all more vital to the fragile Portuguese economy than fermented grape juice.
However, his
heart is clearly in wine. According to several independent reports, he even
keeps a cutting from this newspaper in his breast pocket, which showed that my
average red wine scores are higher for Portuguese wine than for any other
country’s. One of my informants adds: “It is really funny because it always
takes him some time to find the photocopy among all the little papers he
carries with him – but he shows it to literally hundreds of people.”
Portuguese
wine producer Dirk van der Niepoort describes the ambassador as “very special,
intelligent and really wants to do things for Portugal. He does a lot more than
is his duty.” This is his third year in London and this will be his last post,
after Dublin (1998-2000), Berlin (2002-2006) and Washington (2007-2010). In
Berlin, de Vallera is proud of having converted the sommelier at one
of the city’s top restaurants to Portuguese wines, so that by the time he left
there were 14 Douro wines on the list. He also religiously attended the Prowein
wine trade fair in Düsseldorf. In Washington, he famously shipped the Douro red
Quinta do Vale Meão 2004, disguised as olive oil, that was the first Portuguese
table wine to feature in the Wine Spectator magazine’s top 100. He was
determined that arcane US prohibitions on moving alcohol from New York to the
nation’s capital would not rob him of an opportunity to show off this new
Portuguese achievement.
De Vallera earned
his ambassadorial status after toiling 16 hours a day at the Maastricht
negotiations in Brussels. “Then, as a young diplomat, I was very interested to
witness the revolution in Portuguese wine, to see all these new, young
winemakers emerging. You used to have to search for good Portuguese wine but now
it’s difficult to find a bad one. And even the inexpensive ones are good,” he
says delightedly.
He has a
particular fondness for the Douro because his
maternal grandfather had a port wine quinta there, in the
Távora side-valley, the grapes being sold to Barros. He and his family spent
every summer there. He was born in Angola, now the second most important export
market for Portuguese wine after France, which imports huge quantities of basic
port. The youngest of five and seriously threatened by liver disease, he was
shipped back to his grandmother in Lisbon at the age of two and hardly saw his
parents again until he was six.
As an
attendee of the recent New Douro tasting in the embassy, I was struck by the
unusual warmth of the atmosphere. So often, a tasting for the wine trade can
feel rather impersonal and routine. There are various settings, often used by a
range of exhibitors, which have all the charm of the National Exhibition
Centre. But in the Portuguese embassy we really felt, rightly, as though we had
been invited into someone’s home. The wines were truly exciting, not least
because most of the reds were the products of the exceptional 2011 vintage in
the Douro Valley. On these pages I have previously written that if you have
reason to celebrate the year 2011, you might consider investing in 2011 vintage
port. But the quantities made were very small and most of it has been
squirrelled away in private collections by now. I would urge you to think
seriously about the 2011 Douro red table wines too.
João de Vallera was
very much in evidence at this Douro tasting, sauntering between the two
handsome reception rooms with a smile framed by his neat, white naval beard,
glass in hand and, often, with his beloved Olympus EPM2 round his neck. He even
– and this is surely way beyond the call of diplomatic duty – emptied my
spittoon.