Symington Family Estates is a wine

Wine

Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes. The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients. Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast...

 company and Port wine

Port wine

Port wine is a Portuguese fortified wine produced exclusively in the Douro Valley in the northern provinces of Portugal. It is typically a sweet, red wine, often served as a dessert wine, and comes in dry, semi-dry, and white varieties...

 house in Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

, which owns and operates several vineyard

Vineyard

A vineyard is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice...

s and wineries

Winery

A winery is a building or property that produces wine, or a business involved in the production of wine, such as a wine company. Some wine companies own many wineries. Besides wine making equipment, larger wineries may also feature warehouses, bottling lines, laboratories, and large expanses of...

 and owns several brand

Brand

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...

s of Port, Madeira wine

Madeira wine

Madeira is a fortified Portuguese wine made in the Madeira Islands. Some wines produced in small quantities in California and Texas are also referred to as "Madeira", or "Madera", although those wines do not conform to the EU PDO regulations...

 and Douro DOC wines, including some of the oldest and most well-known Port and Madeira brands. With their extensive vineyard holdings and many Port brands, the Symingtons are often described as being a "Port empire

Empire

The term empire derives from the Latin imperium . Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or an oligarchy....

".

The companies owned by Symington Family Estates and individual family members together own 23 quintas (estates) in the Alto Douro region, and additionally lease one and operate one as a joint venture. These 25 quintas together have 940 hectares (2,322.8 acre) of vineyards. Over 70% of the Port wine sold by Symington-owned brands is produced from grapes from these vineyards. Together with these land holdings, the Symingtons are the largest vineyard ownership group in the Douro.

The Symington family are members of the association Primum Familiae Vini

Primum Familiae Vini

Primum Familiae Vini an association of family-owned wineries with a membership limited to twelve families/wineries. The association was established 1993 by Miguel Torres and Robert Drouhin , after they had first come up with the idea in 1990...

.

History

The company was founded by Andrew James Symington who arrived in Oporto from Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 in 1882, and initially joined Graham's. In 1891 he married Beatrice Atkinson, who was descended from several generations of port wine shippers and producers, the oldest known of which was Walter Maynard, who is known to have shipped port wine already in 1652.

By 1905, Andrew James Symington was a partner of Warre & Co and in 1912 he became a partner in Dow's Port. In 1970, the Symington family bought both Graham's and Smith Woodhouse.

In 1989, the Symington family became a partner of the Madeira Wine Company (MWC), which at that time was controlled by the Blandy family behind Blandy's, one of the Madeira companies which had formed MWC. In 1989, the Symingtons also bought Quinta do Vesuvio, which they consider the finest Port quinta from the Ferreira

Ferreira

Ferreira is a Portuguese and Galician languages surname of toponymical origin, meaning Iron smith. It can also be spelled as Fereira, Ferera and Ferarya, if Sephardic Jewish in origin.It may refer to:-General:...

 family, which had run into economic troubles. This quinta was used to introduce a high end single-quinta port in the Symington range.

From 1999, dry Douro wines were added to the Symington range, and in 2001, the prestige brand Chryseia was added.

Wineries and brands owned

The wineries and brands owned by Symington Family Estates are the following:

Port wine

• Graham's (established in 1820)
• Warre's
• Dow's
• Smith Woodhouse
• Quinta do Vesuvio
• Gould Campbell
• Quarles Harris
• Martinez