regulatory body of the sector: the Companhia Geral. From the 1770s to the 1800s, the port
wine trade is living its golden age (Bennett 1990, 1992, 1992-93). From the 1820s onwards,
some liberalizations are under way in different economic sectors, but the port-wine will have
an history of its own. The two periods of liberalizations - 1820s and 1830s, firstly, and the
1860s, secondly, will not resolve most of the problems that the sector has to face: frauds, high
costs, alternation of bad and good years and high and limited production, uncertainty on the
quality of the wine produced and sold, decline of the main export market (the United
Kingdom) and overproduction.
The first crisis in the new system occurs at the time of the French invasions. The
exports of the sector first stalled, and then decreased substantially until 1813. The recovery
and the return of the British shippers to prominence are rather slow and almost complete after
1833.
After some vicissitudes, the regulatory body is extinguished in the 1830s and
reestablished a few years later with some of its prerogatives reinforced in the 1840s that are at
the center of the debates and the focus of the analysis in the next section.
Most of the documents consulted are from the 1850s, 1860s and 1890s, two periods of
great uncertainty in the sector, especially about the future with either an agonizing regulatory
body, the Companhia Geral, that produced as much disorder as order in the production and
trade of port-wine (until 1865) or, in the last decade of the century, rising competition from
other Portuguese regions and an accentuated decline in relative terms of the British market.
The debates make use of economic arguments as I will show in the next section.13
The overall evolution of the sector is not very positive, prices are stagnant or even
decreasing as can be seen from the data of David Justino for four localities that sell wines in
or from the Douro (Justino 1988). In Porto the trend is downward and corresponds to a
general situation for the Douro wines either for consumption in the City or its exportation to
Brazil and Europe.
I insist that during the period under study there is an important change in the relative
prices in the wine production in the Douro. The cost of producing wines in the Douro area has
increased substantially in the second half of the 19th century for several reasons. First, there is
13 The period chosen correspond to (1) a difficult time for the port-wine producers and merchants, (2) a recurrent
debate on the wine, brandy and Douro issues in the parliament and newspapers. The parliament in the 1830s
created a section on agriculture and an ad hoc commission on the problem of Portuguese wines, an issue
dominated by the Upper Douro wines and their setbacks.
10