The Angolans are coming

David Eley is an unlikely successor to Baron Joseph James Forrester, the Victorian Port négociant who produced the first map of the Douro, one of the world’s first wine appellations. Shortly thereafter, he drowned in the river in mysterious circumstances, dragged under by the gold sovereigns in his money belt, according to lurid local legend. The baron’s body was never found.

Eley’s 21st-century map was released to much acclaim earlier this year at a star-studded launch at the Yeatman Hotel in Porto, and he’s now busy painting a series of large-scale ‘vineyard portraits’ of the precipitous landscape, some in an almost abstract style, from a base at Quinta da Perdiz (an estate in the Rio Torto Valley, owned by the Symingtons of Graham’s Port fame).

A nearby property, Quinta da Foz, was sold to Isabel dos Santos, eldest daughter of Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, earlier this year. Dos Santos and his inner clique are busy buying up estates in the Douro. Carm, producer of a 2010 Wine Spectator Top 10 wine, now has an Angolan investor in the shape of General Hélder Vieira Dias, nicknamed Kopelipa. According to Portuguese newspaper reports, Kopelipa already owns four farms in the Douro Valley: Quinta da Serra, Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo (410ha) and two in Almendra (30ha).

Carm owner Celso Madeira flew to Angola to find a distributor for his award-winning olive oil and wine. At a meeting with friends of Kopelipa, Madeira mentioned that two family farms might be on the market. A couple of months later, he received a phone call confirming the general’s interest. Kopelipa paid €1 million for those farms, sight unseen, mainly based on their pedigree of supplying grapes for the Portuguese icon Barca Velha.

After two-and-a-half years producing a geographically based thematic map, Eley knows his way around the rocky terroir of the Douro and the 7 000- odd quintas, of which he has a unique, encyclopediacal view. He would be the perfect realtor for land-hungry Angolan generals.

A migrant worker, he has a wife and two daughters, Daisy and Freya, nicknamed Benty (she was named after Freya Stark… Fray Bentos, hence Benty) back in Saint-Jean-de-Luz between Biarritz and San Sebastián.

Of life in Portugal, Eley admits, “I miss my dog Barton the most.” Barton is named after Anthony Barton, proprietor of Léoville-Barton and Langoa- Barton and one-time love interest of Princess Margaret. “When we lived in Bordeaux in a grand five-storey house with a central staircase, we would drive around in my wife’s Nissan Micra like Batman and Robin. He’d sit on the front seat next to me and put his front paws on the dashboard. When we went round corners, he’d lean to the side and lift one foot up. He was incredible. When I braked, he’d fly into the well under the dashboard and look up at me rather sheepishly. He had a climbing accident in the Pyrenees and dislodged three verte brae and is now stuck in France.”

Eley is currently scoping out a project in South Africa. “I’ve always wanted to visit Africa, after hearing Richard Leakey speak on rhinos in Los Angeles. I spoke to Richard and we agreed to do a joint project, but then my friend’s cancer came back and she was dead within three months. We were driving in her limou sine when the oncologist rang and she picked up this big phone to get the bad news. It was ages before cellphones.”