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The Carcavelos comeback: Reinvention on the Tagus


A rare tasting of Lisbon’s answer to Port suggests these historic fortified wines are re-emerging from a long period of decline, says Richard Mayson


T


here was a time when Carcavelos wine was something of a British household name. At the end


of the Georgian era (early-19th century), it was relatively common to find the words “Lisbon” and “Calcavella” engraved on the decorative silver tags designed to identify the wine served from a decanter. Both were fortified wines, the Port of Lisbon briefly competing with Oporto (Porto) for the shipment of wine from their respective hinterlands. “Lisbon” is no longer (other than as the much larger Vinho Regional “Lisboa”), but Calcavella is making a welcome return as a fortified wine under its modern-day name. Situated close the mouth of the


Tagus, Carcavelos is a now a coastal suburb of Portugal’s capital city, just 12km (7.5 miles) west of Terreira do Paço


(“Black Horse Square”) that marks the center. The surfing crowd who regularly congregate on the broad sandy beach are blissfully unaware of the trials and tribulations of this historic wine region, which was driven to the point of extinction in the late-20th century. Although vines have been planted along the Tagus (Tejo) estuary since the 14th century, Carcavelos was made famous in the 18th century by the Marquês de Pombal, Portugal’s autocratic Prime Minister under José I, who had his then out-of-town residence at Oeiras. Pombal is celebrated for enacting the first modern demarcation of the Port region in 1756, but when it came to Carcavelos, he deliberately flouted his own rules. Pombal apparently sold grapes from his estate to Port producers, and may well have blended


Port with wines from his own estate. At the time, Calcavella was a rich, amber-colored fortified wine that regularly appeared alongside “Lisbon” at Christie’s early London auctions, and the two wines were probably very similar in style. John Croft, writing in 1788, described between 4,000 and 5,000 tuns of “Lisbon” being imported to England, “all promiscuously called Calcavella.” A consignment was sent by José I to the Court of Peking, no doubt at Pombal’s instigation. Calcavella, then Carcavelos, continued to be shipped to England during the 19th century and enjoyed a period of vogue in the aftermath of the Peninsular Wars when Wellington’s troops had been stationed in the hinterland around Lisbon. Later in the century, phylloxera put paid to exports.


66 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025


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