The case of the “salicylate adulteration of port wines”

echoes of a social, economic and scientific view of Portugal-Brazil relations (1885-1905)

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the exact sciences gained notoriety in Portugal through their role as “science at the service of the nation”. In the case of Porto’s academia, the valorization of the “chemical arts” intersected with the new teaching methodology taught at the Academia Politécnica do Porto, and the activities taken in the recent Laboratório Químico Municipal do Porto. One of the most famous echoes of this disposition is revealed in the central role of the academy in the outcome of an important commercial dispute between Portugal and Brazil (1885-1905). The issue of the “salicylation of Port wines”, which greatly harmed Portuguese wine exports to Brazilian territory, only began to fade after the intervention of the scientific work of António Ferreira da Silva, an academic and chemist from Porto. This is one of the rare cases in which the construction of scientific knowledge on analytical methods has a central influence on the resolution of a trade dispute in Europe’s nineteenth century.