Portugal

Portugal kept its own grapes. Around 250 native varieties are in commercial use in a country smaller than the state of Indiana, and international grapes are a minority planting. Touriga nacional, touriga franca, tinta roriz and tinta barroca in the Douro, baga in Bairrada, alvarinho and loureiro in the north west, arinto and encruzado for whites. This is the reason Portuguese wine is hard to guess at and consistently good value: the names give buyers nothing to anchor a price to.

The Douro valley was demarcated in 1756, which makes it the oldest regulated wine region in the world, and it is one of the most extreme places on earth to farm. Vines grow on schist terraces cut into near-vertical slopes above the river, in a hot, dry pocket sheltered by the Marão mountains. The region was defined to protect port, but since the 1990s the same vineyards have produced serious unfortified red wine, and that is now the more interesting half of what the Douro makes.

Port and Madeira are the two fortified wines. Port is a Douro red stopped part-way through fermentation with grape spirit, so it keeps sweetness and gains alcohol, then aged either in bottle as vintage port or in wood as tawny. Madeira comes from an Atlantic island and is deliberately heated and oxidised during ageing, a process that began as an accident of long sea voyages. The result is nearly indestructible: an opened bottle stays fresh for months.

Vinho Verde in the north west is worth separating from its reputation. The name means green wine, in the sense of young, not in colour. The best examples are single-varietal alvarinho from Monção e Melgaço, dry and structured, and have nothing to do with the light, faintly sweet, spritzy style that the name carried abroad for decades.