The Port Wine System in the 1890s

Abstract

the nineteenth century, the port wine trade was one of the most important components of the Portuguese economy.1 British merchants, trading woollens for wine, and later for products from Brazil and other Portuguese colonial possessions, had visited Portugal from at least the early fourteenth century. The beginning during the 1670s of persisting Franco-British hostilities led to radical changes in the British wine trade. Most drinkers in Great Britain, the world's principal wine-importing nation, until then had favoured wines from France at the end of the seven-