The Bearsley Years

The story begins in 1692 with the arrival in Portugal of an English merchant called Job Bearsley. Little is known about the founder of the firm except that he was the owner of The Ram Inn in London’s Smithfield and his family owned land in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. He did not initially trade in Port wine but in ‘red Portugal’, the lean and austere wine of the Minho region in the north west of the country, with its verdant landscape and humid coastal climate. The centres of this trade were the harbour city of Viana do Castelo and the town of Monção on the banks of the Minho River. 

Job’s eldest son Peter also settled in Portugal, becoming British consul in Viana. Peter went a step further than his father, looking further inland to the wild and rocky hills of the upper Douro Valley, sensing that the bigger more muscular wines that were made there were more to the taste of the English market. Such a venture required determination and fortitude. Between the coast and the Douro Valley rises the Serra do Marão, a vast granite mountain range, barren and inhospitable. It was a daunting journey at the best of times, on mule back and led by local guides along barely marked tracks. According to some sources, Peter Bearsley was the first member of the English wine trade to make the journey himself, other merchants being content to buy the wines of the Douro through intermediaries.

Others soon followed in Peter Bearsley’s footsteps and by the time that his sons Bartholomew, Charles and Francis joined their father in Portugal, British merchants had become a familiar sight to the farmers of the Douro Valley. Competition between the British shippers for the best wines had become intense. In 1744 Bartholomew Bearsley became the first British wine shipper to buy a property in the Douro. It was a bold move and gave him great advantage, allowing him to build relationships with the farmers and secure the first pick of their wines. The property, at Lugar das Lages near the old town of Régua, is still owned by the company and its purchase is commemorated in Taylor’s First Estate Reserve Port. During the Peninsular Wars the house on the property, known as the Casa dos Alambiques (‘House of the Stills’) was used briefly as a field hospital for the troops of General Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington.

Francis Bearsely outlived all his brothers and remained a partner in the Oporto house for 61 years from 1744 until his death in 1805 and in the London branch of the firm for 26 years from 1772 to 1798. During this long tenure he not only consolidated the gains of the first three generations but also steered the company through times of turbulence and change. These included the crisis years of the 1750s culminating in the creation by the Marquis of Pombal in 1756 of a monopoly company to regulate the Port trade.