Portuguese Wines and The Wonderful World of Wines

Why Grapenectar.com?

Grapenectar is the result of many years in the food industry, Restaurant, where we put a lot of effort into our wine cellar.
Many of the wines were referred to by our customers as “that nectar” you gave us the last time.
Because “that nectar” came from grapes! hence the name of the site.

The love for wine and food was the next best reason to make a site dedicated to this topic, along with the fact that Portuguese Wines seem to be the poor brothers of an ever growing family.

Not that they are bad or even mediocre wines. It so happens that Portugal has what I consider to be the Nectar of all Nectars; it is called Port Wine

But Port Wine represents a small percentage of all the wines produced in Portugal and I don’t want to imply that they are all good. But the same is true for all other wines of the world.

Still Portugal produces very good wines and my mission is to let wine lovers around the world know about them.

Alright, Portuguese wine merchants and the government are probably to blame for this lack of notoriety.
Since Mateus Rosé was their biggest seller worldwide, why bother promoting anything else?

At the Portuguese Consulate in Toronto, Canada, a representative of ICEP (Portuguese External Commerce Institute), told me bluntly that I should consider importing French or Italian wines because Portugal didn’t have any quality wines worth exporting.
There was some truth to that. In the Dão demarcated region only 25% of all production met the requirements of having a Dão label stuck on the bottle.
The perception that more is better and the lack of government support, farmers were producing quantity to the detriment of quality. Grants were made available but only the ones who knew the ropes would get them. Strange as it may seem, some of the vines planted with those grants produced, instead of wine, nice big mansions and top of the line cars. This special variety of vine is no longer available; only the kind that produces quality wines is now being replanted.

Knowing that Portugal has the second oldest demarcated wine region in the world dating back to 1756, (the first one being introduced in Tokaj-Hegyalja, Hungary in 1730) I went about proving that Portugal did indeed have many fine wines to offer. 

Thank God I’m stubborn. In the years that followed we developed a wine list of more than 70 different Portuguese Wines. Yes, Mateus Rosé was part of it but was only there because we had clients that didn’t know any better. With time we managed to educate some of them.

Stick with us, and we’ll take you through a virtual trip around Portugal’s wine country that I’m sure you will enjoy.