Touriga Nacional was born in the Dão and stands as the noblest of Portugal's native reds. Small-berried and thick-skinned, it yields miserably — historically so little, and so erratically, that growers nearly abandoned it — but what it gives is intense: deep colour, firm tannin and a soaring scent of violets and bergamot.
It is the backbone of the finest Port blends, lending structure and perfume to a wine made to last for decades. From the 1980s a programme of clonal selection rescued it from near-extinction, lifting its yields enough to make it viable, and it now leads the modern dry reds of the Douro, where unfortified table wine has become the region's ambition. A grape of small quantity and large character, kept and multiplied for what it alone can do.