_______________________________

PORTUGAL’S WINES are comparable to its national football team. Over the past few years, both have produced great individuals, featured at all the major events, but neither have ever quite been seen as powerhouses of their respective sectors.

This trend, however, was broken in 2016 when Portugal lifted the European Championship trophy despite starting the tournament as outsiders. So the question is, can the country’s wine industry repeat the trick? One producer hoping to score for Portugal on a global scale is David Baverstock.

After graduating from Roseworthy Agricultural College in Australia, the young wine lover travelled 9,000 miles to work on harvests in France and Germany, but a spontaneous beach holiday led to a romance that would ultimately dictate his career.

“I met my Portuguese wife-to-be on the beach – as you do. So I came to the end of my European adventure.”

Baverstock then returned to Australia to work for well-known winery Saltram in the Barossa Valley and six months later his girlfriend at the time joined him Down Under to get married.

“After a while my wife began to get homesick and I moved to Portugal

with her in 1982, so it was a connection of wine and romance,” says Baverstock.

Since settling in Portugal 35 years ago, Baverstock has been seen as a pioneer of Portuguese wine and a bit of a celebrity in the industry. During this time he has witnessed a transformation of Portuguese wine.

“It’s changed out of sight. The wines were very hit and miss 35 years ago –there weren’t very many top producers for a start. There were very old-fashioned wines and there were red wines that one year would be good but the next year you’d open it up and it’d be fizzy. And white wine you may as well have forgotten about. Portuguese wine was all over the place.

“The first trained Portuguese wine-makers came out of the university in Vila Real in 1986, despite Portugal’s rich history of food and wine culture.”

Baverstock is now the winemaker at Esporão in the Alentejo. “One thing we’ve done better than anyone else I know, certainly in Portugal, is produce big volumes of high-quality wine. We can do that because of the region we’re in, the climate and our winery set-up. We export our wines all around the world and they’re always consistently good.

“Picking a favourite wine is like picking your favourite grandkid, but it’s the consistency of our wines that has made Esporão what it is today.”

A small crowd of industry experts followed Baverstock around the Portuguese Wine Fair in London earlier this year like teenagers at a Justin Bieber concert, but as well as playing the role of wine pop star, the Australian has worked with the real thing – British icon Sir Cliff Richard.

The singer’s wine, Vida Nova, is still available in English supermarkets today and Richard’s vineyard is located in the northern regions of the Algarve, an area of Portugal often associated with higher temperatures and beaches, golf and tennis rather than grape-growing.

“When I got a call from his organistation my immediate reaction was to say ‘no’ because it was the Algarve – and, had it been anybody else, I may have.

“But when I thought about it there was no reason why not. The Algarve would have been no hotter than the Alentejo and it’s close to the sea. In fact, the climate is a little bit more moderate than the Alentejo so I thought there was a good chance to make something that the Algarve hasn’t done before and make some really good wine.

“We planted vineyards with grape varieties which I thought would work, the typical Alentejo varieties.

“Cliff’s original approach was that he had this fantastic property, a beautiful villa and he had this area which was full of fig trees he’d planted. The other half was a run down vineyard.

“There was about 7ha and I managed to convince him that if we only did half of it then it would be too small to build a winery.

“I persuaded him to pull out the fig trees and turn the whole of that area into a vineyard. And he said:

‘Look, basically what I want is a really nice-looking vineyard and if the fruit works out and is good enough then we can make some wine, but don’t stress out.’

“But I thought we could do better than that, and so we did. In the early days, possibly because of the celebrity factor, the wine fell off the shelves and it was really easy.

“He doesn’t have a great wine background but he likes Australian Chardonnay and basically he wanted his red wine to be something like an Australian Shiraz.

“He likes wine but I wouldn’t say he was passionate about it. He’s passionate about tennis.

“Even now, 20 years on, we have holidays in the Algarve and I always go and play some tennis with Cliff. We play doubles usually, against his manager and a professional. If the professional wants to win then they win, but it goes either way.

“My wife was completely crazy about Cliff. She’d been a fan ever since she was a teenager and the first meeting we had was down at the Algarve.

“We went to a restaurant, had a meal and talked about the business. She wanted to join in but Cliff had his entourage of business people to discuss everything and I said to her: ‘You can’t join in at this point, there will be plenty of chances in the future.

So we got through the meeting and the lunch and as we came out she’d been sitting in the car waiting and she came running over and jumped all over him.”

And, with a dry smirk, Baverstock adds: “It was probably the closest we’ve ever been to a divorce.”

After dedicating half of his life to Portuguese wine, Baverstock is still pondering the idea of returning to his beloved Australia.

“I have a pretty full-on job with Esporão and currently we’re restructuring the winemaking team so it won’t happen for a couple of years. But I’m not getting any younger so I need to get around to it sooner or later.

“I’d like to go back and make a vintage and maybe spend two months there a year in February/March when there isn’t much going on in Portugal wine-wise – spend some more time with my family.”

Portugal might hope he doesn’t repatriate. If the country is to ever win big in the wine industry, Baverstock could be its game-changer.