Corpus d'articles du journal The Financial Times

PORT wine shippers say their centuries-old trade is facing a collapse in prices and the possibility of 30,000 grape growers being left destitute.

The reason is not to do with the world recession but a breakdown in the balance between sales and production.

The Association of Port Wine Shippers (AEVP) is refusing to make any commitment about quantities of wine they will buy in 1993 or how much they will pay. 'We already have millions of pounds tied up in stock,' said one shipper, 'and we simply cannot undertake to increase our stocks further without some guarantee that over-production will cease.'

The shippers' underlying fear is that over-production and falling prices will undermine the prestige of port and its hard won reputation.

In a harshly-worded letter to Mr Anibal Cavaco Silva, the Portuguese prime minister, the AEVP warns: 'The lowering of consumer prices is discrediting the product, which could suffer the same fate as sherry, with a swing of consumption away to competing drinks.'

The association also queries procedures for issuing licences to growers, expressing concern about what they perceive as a lack of control over distributing licences.

They note that the Casa do Douro (House of Douro), which controls wine production in port's demarcated zone in the upper reaches of the Douro river, has granted licences for more than 100,000 pipes of wine in excess of the government stipulated total. (A pipe equals 550 litres.)

This means that stocks of port are now vastly in excess of forecast demand, even allowing for the 'law of the third'. This was imposed to guarantee a minimum age for port on the market and states that a company cannot sell more in a given year than one-third of stocks in December of the previous year.

Buyers for European supermarkets that purchase large quantities of port for bottling under their own label have taken advantage of the over-production and the price of buyer's-own-brand (BOB) port has dropped 20 per cent over the past year. Over-production has also hit premium branded port.

The pressure of over-production is now coming to a head and the hardest-hit victims will be the grape farmers of the upper Douro valley. The region was the first to be demarcated in 1756 and farmers are totally dependent on vines for their livelihoods.

Farmers, forced by over-production to sell below cost, face real hardships and there have been angry demonstrations in the streets of Regua, the grape-growing capital.

The amount of wine that can be produced each year is stipulated by a government body, the Port Wine Institute (IVP), on a basis of existing stocks, forecast sales and other factors.

But the responsibility for distributing individual licences stating how much farmers can produce and of what quality, falls to the Casa do Douro.

This is a corporate body left over from the Salazar dictatorship, to which all farmers must belong. Besides allocating growing licences, it also represents farmers in terms of prices fixed with the shippers and buys excess production from growers.

From 1986 the Casa do Douro began issuing production licences far in excess of the overall limit set by the IVP. By 1992 the accumulated excess had reached more than 100,000 pipes. In 1992, the shippers stepped in to buy the excess production of the 1991 harvest themselves to stop the market from being flooded.

The shippers point out that the biggest excesses came in an election year and that the votes of 30,000 farmers were clearly more important than 40 shippers. Some shippers have hinted at corruption saying 'the money for election campaigns has to come from somewhere'.

The Casa de Douro complicated the issue even further in 1990 when it bought 40 per cent of the second largest Port shipper, Real Companhia Velha (RCV). The Italian financier Carlo De Benedetti and his Portuguese partner recently pulled out of RCV after a year of management squabbles. The Casa do Douro is burdened with debts of over Es25bn and stocks that may be worth a lot less than the market prices that body's supporting banks attribute to them.

The solution, according to the shippers, is to wipe the Casa do Douro's massive stocks off the market by distilling them into grape brandy and to hand over production licences to a more independent body such as the IVP. The AEVP urges low production levels over the next few years to restore the balance between stocks and demand.

'We've just been all over Europe holding tastings to celebrate 1991 as a vintage year,' said one shipper, 'but the truth is the trade is in deep trouble and something needs to be done very quickly.'

'Do you know the works of modern German philosophy?'

'Er, only in English.'

'Well, there it is all explained, ja? You understand?'

WELL, SORT of. The taxi-driver was talking to me about metaphysics on the way from Tegel Airport. He seemed to be driving all over Berlin - I had to keep saying 'left]', 'right]' or 'mind that child]' - and he was propounding this strange theory. It was that Berlin is not a place but an agglomeration of times. For four decades, he explained, Berlin was a western European city in an eastern European country.

Since this is manifestly impossible (he argued), the place cannot exist as a three-dimensional geographical reality. Therefore, Berlin must live in the fourth dimension where time alone is relevant.

I suspect he is right. Many people to whom I mention this argument are unconvinced. But they have not seen what I have seen: a wall known to be impregnable having holes punched in it by history, through which East German guards poked friendly faces back in February 1990; a city full of clocks that failed to keep time because eastern-western electricity systems could not mesh (February 1993). And a town centre - we speak of what used to be West Berlin - that mixes time-zones with ingenious perversity.

Let us sketch this city centre, since it is one of the most chaotically splendid in Europe. In recent years West Berlin has been upstaged as a curiosity-zone by the previously cloaked mysteries of East Berlin. But - awful truth - once the cloak is off, East Berlin stands revealed as a fairly charisma-free place: a social and visual wasteland only beginning to recover from decades of institutionalised deprivation.

West Berlin has a wild charm and a concertina'd sense of history. The centre is its masterpiece and deserves a 360-degree pan. Over there is the famous Berlin Zoo, with its Japanese archway and frieze-adorned aquarium wall fronting the street. Inside, animals from the dawn of time disport. My favourite view - as a longtime Berlin visitor for the annual film festival - is from the Festival Centre windows, which abut the zoo: crows caw and wheel while rude-bottomed Barbary apes gambol over frosty black rocks.

Opposite the atavistic is the (almost) modern. The EuropaCenter is a once state-of-the-art shopping mall topped by a slow-twirling Mercedes sign and boasting, among other things, a terraced jungly cafe, a rooftop observation platform, a medley of glossy eateries and a towering water clock. In this still chic labyrinth the primitive and modern jostle in a pleasant consumerist frenzy.

Then, plonk in the centre of the city's centre, as if pulled both ways by the epochal tug of war around it, is the Gedachtniskirche (Memorial Church). One blasted, blackened Gothic spire stands next to a tall, boxy tower like an overgrown stereo speaker. This architectural ensemble symbolises the old Berlin that survived Hitler jostling with the new Berlin that raises one mellifluously defiant finger to his horrid ghost.

At least I think that is what it symbolises. But here is West Berlin's appeal. You are given the riot of raw data, the conflicting slices of time, and you decide what it all means. Take the famous Kurfurstendamm, which spokes out mile on mile from the centre. Here you may sink mental dating equipment into time's strata by merely looking at the buildings and people.

In the hotels and apartment buildings a Teutonic modernism wrestles with rare glimpses of the unbombed old. Architecturally, Berlin is the face that launched a thousand lifts: tiny bits of the old cafes, theatres and movie-houses grin through the cosmetic surgery. And note the success with which styles collide. The giant Wertheim department store, for instance, a galleon of ribbed glass, jostles serenely with the oldy-worldy quaintness of the Cafe Mohring.

In the people, the war of competing zeitgeists is more beguiling still. The old lady with the fur coat and powdered cheekbones obviously lived through the days of Dietrich. She is heading straight for Kranzler's and a cup of chocolate with a sachertorte. The old man with the monocle, cane and military tread may have fought for Hitler but now prefers to be associated with the earlier Prussian heyday. Back then everyone looked like Fritz Lang and could have had their portraits painted by Georg Grosz.

Then there are the middle-aged Berliners, careworn and self-effacing. These men and women avoid your glances. They are the People Without A History, the baby boomers born into the spiritual bust that was post-war Germany.

Finally, there are the young. Here is the most curious collision of all between time-zones. The young in West Berlin used to be a paradigm of the world's student population. Drawn to the city as a haven from the military draft, they were prosperous youngsters dressing down to be radical. Long shabby hair, long shabby coats, long shabby faces. Radical chic was the tribute paid by capitalism, which had the freedom to play charades, to Marxism, which didn't. Then, after the Wall fell in November 1989, in rushed all the young East Berliners who were genuinely poor and wore authentically shabby coats, hair, faces, etc. The young Westerners took one look, realised the game was up and began dressing according to their incomes.

Since there is mostly one-way traffic today - day-tripping Berliners come from East to West rather than vice versa - East Berlin has little of this sense of multiple reality. You should visit the statutory landmarks, which at least prove that the East has been through some of the same mainline stations of progress and crisis as the West.

The Brandenburg Gate, with its chariot of destiny riding a slice of neo-classical wedding cake; Unter Den Linden, slowly returning to consumerist frenzy; the Fernsehturm (TV Tower), with its revolving observation platform and its look of a giant needle that has swallowed a sputnik.

But much of East Berlin - it takes years to recover from socialism - is still a place of monochrome rhythms and urban anomie. Compare its centre, Alexanderplatz, with that of West Berlin: dull, concrete vastness; robot-spirited shoppers, and nearby a park, Marx-Engels Forum, whose mathematical symmetries chill the soul. Karl and Friedrich themselves are present, cast in bronze. Sensing that they are due for historical melt-down, they stand dead still as if to avoid detection.

Returning to West Berlin is like blinking into the sun after hours in a mineshaft. You do not need to visit museums or galleries here to know the difference in cultural richness and traditions of freedom. All you need do is walk along a busy street.

Make randomness your style. Go out of your hotel - I recommend, according to your purse, the Am Zoo, the Savoy or (spoil yourself) the Kempinski - and turn left or right. Pass the street busker with his marionette violinist playing great cadenzas from Paganini. Throw an interested look at the man in drag miming to Aida as it issues from his ghetto-blaster. Pause by the stall selling communist-surplus Soviet Army caps with hammer-and-sickle badges. Buy a cholesterol-intensive bockwurst mit brotchen - sausage with roll - at the street-corner Imbiss snack van. (In the evening you will eat at Florians, home of the New German cuisine, or more informally at the charming all-wooden Zum Dortmunder, which resembles a Bavarian hunting lodge with gamey food to match).

Then slip your moorings. Walk on down the Ku'damm as time's crosswinds ruffle your hair and your sense of history.

Useful: Slow Walks in Berlin, by Michael Leitch (Hodder & Stoughton, Pounds 9.99). His previous books, covering slow walks in Barcelona, Paris and London, won the attention of the judges for the Thomas Cook Guide Book Award. The latest offers 22 leisurely yet carefully-planned walks around Berlin, with route guides, maps and much helpful information.