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Taylor’s Port buys Douro table wine and tourism business
Following its first foray into table wine production with the purchase of a pan-regional Portuguese producer last year, Taylor’s Port has made another acquisition – this time in the Douro, db can exclusively reveal.
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(Pictured: Quinta do Portal’s Casa das Pipas hotel)
News of the move reached db this morning, with Adrian Bridge, CEO at The Fladgate Partnership – which owns Taylor’s Port along with other famous fortified wine brands from Croft to Fonseca – confirming that the group had acquired its first vineyards in the Douro for table wine making.
Along with 53 hectares of vineyards, Bridge said that Fladgate has also bought a winery, large storage facility, along with bottling line, as well as a 16-room boutique hotel and a restaurant.
The business, called Quinta do Portal, has plantings for producing table wine “very close” to a 200ha Fladgate property in the Vale de Mendiz, said Bridge, who also noted that the acquisition “completes our move to table wine”.
Bridge, who has often said that The Fladgate Partnership would not enter the table wine making business in the Douro because the company needed grapes for Port production, has justified the acquisition of the Portal vineyards on the basis that they will “be dedicated to table wines leaving the existing properties to carry on making great Port.”
In August last year, as db was first to report, The Fladgate Partnership bought all the assets of a business called Ideal Drinks, which comprises several estates in three major Portuguese wine regions: the Minho, Dão and Bairrada – but not the Douro, where The Fladgate Partnership is based and owns 500ha of vineyards for producing Port.
With the Portal purchase this month, Fladgate can now add Douro DOC to its list of table wines, with Bridge telling db that the newly-acquired vineyards are “high, fairly flat and ideal for producing great table wines.”
He also said that Portal benefitted from the same consultant winemaker – Pascal Chatonnet – as Ideal Drinks, although he noted that it was a coincidence that both businesses employed the same Bordeaux-based winemaking support.
In terms of plans for Portal post the acquisition, Bridge said that The Fladgate Partnership would be investing in the Douro-based business.
Commenting that “the vineyards have the potential to be mechanised in the future,” he also said that Fladgate would “modernise the winery over the next few years”, and use this updated facility to make both wines and Port from the Vale de Mendiz vineyards – new and existing.
He also noted that the Portal vineyards and facilities were “in a perfect location for us: it is on the road from Sabrosa to Pinhao and it is only 1 hour 10 minutes by car from Porto on the edge of a village called Celerios.”
Finally, he said that he was “looking at how we brand the wines from the Douro,” but will be offering them alongside those from Minho, Dão and Bairrada,” adding that “they will launch almost simultaneously in most markets.”
Last month, Fladgate Partnership revealed that it would be scaling up its table wine business, initiating the “continued purchases of vineyards”. Bridge noted that buying land in the Douro was difficult due to the region’s “Napoleonic land laws”, with in the realm of 30,000 small growers “which all rely on their patch”.
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