Thursday, April 10 2008

A-Douro-ble!

Running all the way from Spain to the Atlantic, the Douro is the heart of Porto

It’s been an eventful couple of days hitting the bricks in and around Porto. We’ve only managed a little bit of the city for sightseeing, but made up for it by going to a cork factory and getting an insider’s tour of the Taylor’s Port lodge.

‘Lodge’ is the word for ‘Port wine storage and blending house’. The actual Port is made in wineries near the vineyards along the banks of the Douro, some of them hundreds of miles up-river. After the wine is stable and racked into barrels it’s transported to the lodges for ageing and the selection of lots for blending. This used to be done by the charming barcas rabelos, open-hulled sailboats loaded with 20 or more of the seven hundred litre port barrels, but with the Douro tamed by dams, it’s done now by trucks.

Taylor’s (known as Taylor-Fladgate in North America, to avoid conflict with a US winery of the same name) is a beautiful location with a gorgeous terrace and a great view of the city and the river. We had a chance to see the barrel room, and the enormous blending vats and got a hefty dose of the long and interesting history of the company. Funny to think that the most famous wine of Portugal is wholly a creature of English expatriate families!

We also managed a small tasting of their dry white Port, ‘Dry Chip’ (haven’t found out what that actually means. Anyone have some chip-dip?) and learned that white Port was created during one of Britain’s on again/off again wars with Spain, when there was a serious Sherry shortage. The clever fellows in the Port lodges were only too happy to help out with a white version of their regular fare.

We also tried their 2004 LBV, which was rich and spicy, with lots of dried fruit notes and nuts in the finish, and then it was time for another fabulous dinner of enough seafood to fill a public aquarium and enough wine to fill the tanks. Whee!

The cork factory? Ah, that’s going to have to wait until I have a chance to get my pictures downloaded and sorted out. I’ve already taken two hundred snaps—thank goodness I bought a new 2 gigabyte memory card for our camera! The tour was definitely worth the trip, because even though I’m supposed to be an expert, I found out how little I really knew about corks and what goes in to taking a piece of bark off of a tree and turning it into a wine bottle stopper. It’s impressive stuff—if you’re a wine geek like me!

Off to some more conventional sightseeing in Porto today. Which way to the museum?

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