Review: Richard Mayson - The Wines of Portugal

Simon reviews Richard Mayson's new book The Wines of Portugal, published by Infinite Ideas (The Classic Wine Library) on November 12th 2020.

Portugal is the Riesling of wine producing countries - it's the perennial misunderstood and under appreciated nation that much of the wine trade continues to position as 'up and coming'. Huge tracts of the wine drinking public still believe it only produces sweet fortified wines, cheap Vinho Verde and mass produced rosé. There are reportedly sommeliers in the US who don't realise it's a separate country to Spain.

For all these reasons, it's great that there's a new book in the English language about Portugal's wines. Richard Mayson's The Wines of Portugal is the latest arrival in the Classic Wine Library series, published by Infinite Ideas. As with all the books in this series, the presentation is (to put it politely) workmanlike, with a mere eight pages of colour photos and a layout that wouldn't look out of place in a 1980s schoolbook. Let's move swiftly onto the content.

Mayson is an acknowledged expert when it comes to Portuguese wine, with a long track record and impressive list of…