When the ocean liner the Queen Mary was launched in 1936 the first-class passengers drank Graham’s Six Grapes Port.When the Bermuda-registered Queen Mary II was launched in 2004 it was served to the passengers again.For hundreds of years Portuguese Port wine has represented old-world sophistication. About one-third of the Port in the world is produced by the Symington family of Oporto, Portugal. They manage and own Graham’s and several other Port companies. Branches of the family have been producing Port for hundreds of years in northern Portugal.Rupert Symington was in Bermuda this week, offering tasting workshops to staff at Burrows Lightbourn. The Royal Gazette Lifestyles section sat down with him to learn more about Port and its production.“Port has always been popular in Bermuda,” said Mr Symington. “Historically, it was probably popular because it was one of the few wines you could transport easily. A lot of the early ships coming to Bermuda from Europe probably carried Port. So there is a kind of tradition here.”Port had brandy added to it to help with the trip across the ocean. This ‘fortified’ wine could travel better than any other.Mr Symington said Burrows Lightbourn is probably the biggest supplier of Port in Bermuda. He was surprised by how much Port he saw on store shelves in Bermuda than in other countries.“I think it has the reputation of being one of the world’s fine wines, so it is probably not something people go to when they first start drinking wine,” he said. “As they work up the wine ladder and get more confident they will discover Port.”He said that many people perceive Port to be high in alcohol but it only contains 19 percent not much higher than a big California cabernet.And while many say they don’t like sweet wine, Mr Symington believed the exact opposite was true.“People say they don’t like sweet wine but [they do]. It’s just not fashionable to say that,” he said. “That is changing now. In the United States until the 1950s, about 50 percent of the wine market was sweet and fortified. People went away from it as they became more sophisticated and started buying French dry wines. Now they are coming back and realising that they do like Port.”The Symington vineyards are in the Douro valley of northeastern Portugal. A mountainous arid region that usually only gets rain in the winter, it has been producing wine since the late 1600s. The Symingtons do not irrigate their grapes and the soil has good drainage which means the vines have to put down deep roots to find water. The result is small, thick-skinned grapes with a highly concentrated flavour. These grapes are almost unique to the area.“Port is all about this concentration of the grapes,” said Mr Symington. “There is a lot of flavour in the glass. That is what people are looking for, particularly in North America where they are looking for wines with a lot of intensity.”Port was the most famous and expensive wine in the world between 1700 and 1900. The fortified wine takes its name from the coastal Portuguese city of Oporto which today has about one million people. The Symingtons have their warehouses and offices in Oporto, where the Port was traditionally stored because it was cooler.Their ruby port is aged for about three years, but their tawny Ports, which are becoming increasingly popular, are barrel-aged for about 20 years. Graham’s Six Grapes is probably one of their most well known Port products. The name refers to a ranking that was given to wine at harvest time, with six being the highest.“As a first taste of Port, Six Grapes is probably one of the best everyday ports out there,” he said.While some old wine businesses shy away from the word “mechanisation”, the Symingtons are proud of their move towards it.“Given the geography of the region we cannot mechanise our picking or our pruning which are the two most expensive processes,” he said. “But all our vineyards are now laid out so that we can get a small tractor through for projects such as weeding, or treating the vineyards. My family were among the first in the 1960s to put in mechanical winemaking systems. Recently, we developed the robotic treader. This does the work of what people used to do foot stomping the tanks.”He admits though that he is still involved with more traditional methods and was stomping the grapes at one of his vineyards as recently as last week. His feet are reportedly still stained red from the work.Useful website: www.symington.com .