History of Wine

		history OF wine
					The Wine has a preponderant role in the development of the modern civilizations, the “fruit of the grapevine” and work of the men is not exceeded by an agricultural product and the “god’s nectar” is appreciated more than the 4000 years. Although the history of the wine as started many centuries before was with the Romanization in Portugal that an enormous qualitative jump as gave as in many other sectors. The Romans where the ones who introduced the pruning in Portugal and they where also the ones creating the "socalcos". One can even wonder if Christ was drinking a Palhete during his Last Supper... During the period in which Portugal was dominated by the Arabs wine had a slight regression due to prohibition of the Arabs to consume fermented beverages.
		The XII and XIII centuries are periods of great prosperity for the wine sector in Portugal as soon as the Templar, Santiago's, Cister and the Hospitaliers orders have populated and grown the vine yards that had been destroyed during the period of the Reconquista. Wine began to be a part of the medieval diet and the Portuguese wine became well known across Europe reaching Russia. If the Portuguese wine had profit notoriety in XII and XIII centuries in XV and XVI centuries it prospered for the World arriving the new continents and being recognized across the world the outstanding quality of the Portuguese Wine. During this period of time aging techniques had been perfected and it was truly appreciated the wine of wheel, that went next to the bilges of the boats, submerged.
					It is in the century XVIII after signature of the Treaty of Methwen that the Marquis of Pombal sees himself forced to create the 1st demarcated wine region of the world, the Douro, with intention to discipline practices in the production and the commercialization of the Port wine, which represented sufficiently for the national economy. In the XX century the severity of the "Estado Novo" was remained, after recuperating from the evil of Phylloxera in the XIX century, bringing some stability to the sector, stability which was kept and allowed to increase the quality of the wines produced in Portugal.
		The wine Gravato has the name of a battle in which the anglo -portuguese troops left victorious, havis for adversaries the frenchmen whom they forced to leave Portugal.It was the battle of Gravato that took place in the 3rd of april 1811.
					Still in the XX^th century, the Palhete had great prominence because it was a famous wine in great cities like Lisbon or Oporto. The Portuguese actor Vasco Santana mentions it in the film "O Pátio das Cantigas" where after piercing the wall of the merchant Evaristo he says: It’s not a miracle it’s a palhete. (...)António Silva says: “This is that one palhete of first class! (he drinks and then says) There’s no more of this one!”

		Wine & Health
		A study from Dr. Luísa Paulo showed that the Beira Interior wines can prevent diabetes and stomach cancer, so don't be a stranger look out for your health. You'll see it's good to take care of it! A simple procedure based on solid-phase extraction and high performance liquid chromatography coupled to diode array detector has been developed and validated for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of cis- and trans-resveratrol in wines. The method was linear from 0.025 (lower limit of quantitation, LLOQ) to 15 μg/mL for trans-resveratrol and from 0.023 (LLOQ) to 0.92 μg/mL for cis-resveratrol, with correlation coefficients higher than 0.99 for both isomers. Intra- and interday precision and accuracy were in conformity with the criteria normally accepted in method validation, that is, CVs inferior to 15% and mean relative errors within a ±14% interval. The extraction presented mean efficiencies close to 100% for both analytes. The validated methodology was applied to 186 Portuguese red wines from different regions, grape varieties and vintage. The results obtained showed that the content of trans-resveratrol in red wines ranged from 0.05 to 10.9 μg/mL, while the concentrations of cis-resveratrol ranged from 0.04 to 8.71 μg/mL. in Journal of agriculture food and chemistry 03/2011