The land around Porto is burning when we arrive. Forest fires, fueled by four months of drought, are raging to the east and smoke billows over the city toward the Atlantic Ocean.
We’re here to see Symington Family Estates, a foremost name in Portugal’s port industry. Chief marketing officer and sustainability lead Rob Symington discusses the impact of the fires over lunch at the company’s Bomfim 1896 Pedro Lemos restaurant in Pinhão. He says rising global temperatures play a part in their frequency, noting that the valley recorded a temperature of 118°F in 2023.
The changing climate presents challenges, but Symington is an eco-conscious business. In 2019 it became the first Portuguese drinks company to attain B Corp accreditation, indicating high standards of environmental and social sustainability.
It’s also a business that understands the value of long-term thinking. Symington vines take roughly five years to start producing fruit considered suitable for winemaking. The mountainous terrain renders mechanical pickers almost inviable, meaning 96% of grapes are still hand-harvested. The cellar for its most highly prized brand, Graham’s, contains some of the world’s oldest bottles of port. Taking time to ensure quality makes Symington a perfect partner for another sector of the beverage alcohol industry: Scotch whisky.
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Symington and The Dalmore
There is only one single malt whisky producer—not just in Scotland, but globally—that has access to Graham’s port casks: The Dalmore.
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Founded in 1839 by adventuring merchant Alexander Matheson, the distillery near Alness in the Highlands was taken over by descendants of Clan Mackenzie in 1867. Shortly after, it began experimenting with multi-cask maturation—more than a century before the practice would hit the Scotch mainstream. The Dalmore has been sourcing casks from Graham’s since master distiller Richard Paterson first visited its cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia in the 1970s.
The brands are showcasing their unparalleled maturation expertise in a new collaboration: the Cask Curation Series – Port Edition. It comprises three single malts, aged 27, 30 and 43 years, finished in exceptional (and exceptionally rare) Graham’s single-harvest tawny port casks dating from 1997, 1994 and 1952. The trio will be sold together, presented in bespoke leather carry cases in a Graham’s-inspired shade of teal. Only 150 sets will be available globally.
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It is the second of four releases in the Cask Curation Series and follows the Sherry Edition, launched in 2023 in partnership with The Dalmore’s exclusive sherry cask supplier Gonzáles Byass.
During an exclusive launch event for the Port Edition at the Graham’s 1890 Lodge in Gaia, we had the chance to sample the ports in question—including the last remaining bottle of the 1952 vintage—before The Dalmore team unveiled the whiskies. Although these spirits only rested briefly in the port casks (the 27 Year Old and 30 Year Old for two years, the 43 Year Old for three), the wines’ characters shine through. Classic Dalmore notes of chocolate and orange are complemented by rich red fruit, plump raisin, warming spice and nuttiness.
For The Dalmore and Graham’s, this collection celebrates a shared ethos that holds quality paramount, the harmonious pairing of port and whisky symbolic of their long-standing bond.
Kieran Healey-Ryder, head of whisky discovery at The Dalmore owner Whyte & Mackay, says the distillery’s rich and robust spirit is compatible with a variety of interesting casks. “It’s not just about a Portuguese wine for us, it’s about the best casks that we could find in this place,” he explains.
“If we find a vineyard with the kind of flavor potential that we’ve found here [with Symington], we get quite excited. If we find people who look after those vineyards with the kind of ethos that we use at The Dalmore, and then they look after their wood and their casks, and they make a positive impact on the place that they’re making it, we get even more excited because it’s that shared ethos that the Cask Curation series is celebrating.”
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Who are the Symingtons?
The Symington family have been producing port in the Douro Valley for five generations. The story began in 1882 with Andrew Symington, who moved from Glasgow to the Douro and found work at Graham’s, a traditional port house dating from 1820.
The early Symington family business was primarily a port blender, buying in wine from some of the valley’s thousands of small producers. Today, Symington Family Estates cultivates almost 2,500 acres of vines and purchases further stocks from 800 local wineries.
The Graham’s brand has been part of its portfolio since 1970. In the decades since, Graham’s ports—including aged and single-harvest tawnies, rubies and vintages—have earned global acclaim. The Symington stable also includes Cockburn’s, Dow’s and Warre’s.
The only port producer in the Douro with its own cooperage, Symington takes cask quality seriously. This dedication caught the eye of Dalmore’s Paterson, who found an equal for his passion and skill in maturation in head winemaker Charles Symington.
This passion actually makes The Dalmore–Graham’s partnership less likely. “Unlike wine producers, red wine producers in particular, we want our casks,” Rob explains. “We never want to give them away, because the best-aged tawnies are aged in seasoned oak, and until the thing falls apart, we want to keep it. So, it requires a very special friend and partner for us to let them go.”
Pursuing port perfection
To help us become more familiar with Graham’s port, Rob took us on a tour of Symington Family Estates’ key vineyard and boutique winery at Quinta dos Malvedos. He joined the family business seven years ago, after founding and growing a recruitment start-up in London, but he and his siblings grew up among these vineyards. He helped out with his first harvest in 2002. “It was an awful year,” he recalls, “and everyone likes to blame me for it.”
The Douro Valley contains the largest area of mountain vineyard on the planet, boasting 106,225 acres. Symington Family Estates cultivates the largest swathe of any port house, divided into 80 plots at altitudes of 230 ft to 2,130 ft. It’s fair to say the Symington family are experts in this particular style of viticulture.
Rob is keen to stress just how unfavorable this landscape is for winemakers. The valley’s schist soils are rich in minerals and provide excellent drainage, but most of the vineyards slope at an angle of more than 30 degrees. The yields are astonishingly low compared with other wine-producing regions. Historically, the only way to get port out of the winery and to the cellars was to roll casks down these steep slopes, load them into traditional rabelo boats and make the journey downriver to Gaia—a far more treacherous undertaking before the Douro River was dammed.
“You’d have to be absolutely desperate for a good drop of wine to be, pre-mechanisation, hacking stone terraces out of these slopes,” Rob says with a rueful laugh. “By any economic measure, it doesn’t make sense to produce wine here, but we do it because of heart, we do it because of place, and we do it because, like it or not, we are completely embedded in the fabric of this region.”
The Dalmore Cask Curation Port Edition will be available from October 1, 2024; for more details, go to thedalmore.com. More information about Symington Family Estates can be found at symington.com. You can browse the Graham’s port collection at grahams-port.com.
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