Quinta de Vargellas is the backbone of Taylor, Fladgate’s declared vintage Portos, lending them consistency and defining their style. In the best undeclared years, Quinta de Vargellas stands on its own as a single-quinta vintage Porto.
Vargellas was originally, in the early 1800s, three separate properties: The upper portion, Quinta do Vale; the middle portion, Quinta de Vargellas-do-Meio; and the lower portion, known by the several names of Quinta de Vargellas-de-Baixo, Quinta de Galega and Quinta do Brito. Documents substantiate that an 1808 vintage wine, possibly among those that surfaced in London in the 1820s, mentioned above, was produced from Quinta de Vargellas-do-Meio. Sometime between 1850 and 1890, the vineyards were consolidated into a single property. In 1893, on the heels of the arrival of the phylloxera epidemic, Taylor Fladgate purchased Vargellas in a state of near ruin; its yield in that year was barely 5% of current production. Today it is an A-rated vineyard, with 103 acres of vines planted on its steep, northeast-facing terraced slopes descending precipitously to the banks of the Douro.
