Prats & Symington: Flavors of the Douro
The company’s red table wines manifest the region’s past and future
I recently attended a virtual tasting of two premium Douro table wines by Prats & Symington, a joint project between Port producer Symington Family Estates and the Prats family, former longtime owners of Cos d’Estournel. Bruno Prats, who until 1998 was Cos’s winemaker, and Rupert Symington, Symington’s C.E.O., led the tasting. It was a chance for me to revisit wines I’d first tasted on a 2019 trip to the Douro; I took the photos in this article at Quinta de Roriz, which supplies the lead fruit for both wines.
The Prats and Symington families had long enjoyed friendship through Primum Familiae Vini, an association of multi-generational family wine producers. In 1998, after Prats sold Cos d’Estournel, Bruno’s son, Jean-Guillaume, remained behind as winemaker, but Bruno became a free agent.
“My father”—James Symington—“had the idea of calling Bruno, and saying, ‘How about trying to make some great wine in the Douro?’ We had ambitions to see if we could make table wine, but we knew nothing about table wine,” Symington said, at the start of the virtual tasting. “Literally nothing.”
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