Port or Porto wine is generally regarded as a dessert wine, even though we believe looking at it from that lens is highly reductive. Of course you can enjoy Port with your pudding of choice, but you can also sip it as an aperitif, or use it in cocktail making.
Simply put, Port wine is a Portuguese fortified wine produced in the north of the country, namely the Douro Valley which is linked with the city of Porto. Fortified wines are those whose fermentation process has been interrupted by the addition of extra alcohol.
During the wine making process, the naturally present sugar in grapes ferments and becomes alcohol. By adding a spirit such as brandy to the wine at a key moment of the procedures, fermentation is interrupted as the present yeast is killed.
Fortified wine came about as a preservation method back in the day. Port wine is a strong, rather alcoholic and sweet wine from Portugal. Portugal has been producing wine for at least years. In the Douro region where Port is produced today, Romans whose empire extended to Portugal from the days before Christ until about the year , were already making very good use of the fertile lands of this part of Portugal back then.
Port wine with this specific designation only came about in the 17th century though. So close that, until today, both countries have the oldest and still running treaty of any two countries in the whole wide world! Commercial relations back then translated into the export of wine from Portugal to England, in exchange of receiving our much beloved cod fish which we would locally transform into salt cod, that is, bacalhau.
