LAND LUBBING IN PORTUGAL

Lagos Portugal

After the end of the ARC Europe Boat Rally, we spent a few days visiting with people from the remaining ARC boats, and planned a land trip through Portugal. This was the first big trip that we have taken on land since we took delivery of Berkeley East three and a half years ago. While we enjoy all of our boat travel, after the Atlantic passage, we were looking forward to some non-boat related fun. And although Portugal has never been on our “must-see” list, we really enjoyed the parts of the country that we saw with the ARC Europe Rally and we wanted to see more.

We began the trip with a train ride to Lisbon, Portugal’s largest city. In its prime, Lisbon sat at the center of a great maritime empire, imported exotic wares from around the world and became a hub of commerce for Europe, Africa and Asia. Today, Lisbon is a cosmopolitan city where history has blended with modern day life. We explored the city for several days, becoming locals on the trolleys and buses. Lisbon has more squares with statues of horses/riders than any place we’ve ever seen. At nearly every street, every turn, there is a square and a monument. You would think that navigating through the city would be easy, but not all of the squares are on the map so you never really know which one you are looking at.

We learned about Lisbon’s past, seeing all of the highlights, including one of the best maritime museums that we ever visited. The boat models alone are worth the time. Of course, we had to check out the food and wine. Portugal has some very good wines, which we sampled with sea bass and/or octopus nearly every night.

They do have other food, but we really liked the sea bass and octopus and were on a quest to find the best. At Senior Vhino, we were treated to some of Portugal’s famous Fado music, the oldest urban folk music in the world. We have now added Fado to our eclectic music collection.

Perhaps one of the most impressive things about Lisbon was the people who went out of their way to help us. A little man saw us looking at a map and came to help. He didn’t speak any English but he spoke very loudly and enthusiastically in Portuguese and with lots of pointing, sent us in the right direction. A woman approached us at a bus stop to see where we wanted to go and then engaged the assistance of two men to make sure we got on the right bus. We were warned of pickpockets and thieves, but encountered happy, gracious people. Even the taxi drivers were polite and friendly.

CASTLES, CHURCHES, CONVENTS AND CATHEDRALS

Not to mention monasteries – we saw them all. And each one was more unique and more beautiful than the one before. We left Lisbon by car, driving east, then west, then north, through many different regions and towns. Sintra, Evora, Obidos, Acobaca, Batalha, Coimbra, Amarante, Porto, Douro, we visited quaint towns, walled cities, a bustling metropolis and the wine country. The castles, churches, convents, cathedrals and monasteries were amazing. Every time we thought that we had seen enough castles, churches, convents, cathedrals and monasteries, we went in another one that took our breath away. For such a small country, Portugal is full of many interesting places.

In addition to the castles, churches, convents, cathedrals and monasteries, we walked on top of walls that enclosed small cities, hiked through ancient vineyards and even chased animals across a Quinta (wine estate). In Evora, we began what we thought was a visit to the Coelheiros Wine Estate, and ended up seeing the harvesting of cork trees and chasing herds of deer in a Land Rover, with the wine estate’s owner at the wheel. It was probably the best day of the trip and the wines were great as well.

On the last day of our vacation, we were treated to the second best fireworks display (preceded by Sydney, Australia on New Year’s Eve) that we’ve ever seen. The small town of Pineo had a parade, party and an amazing fireworks display right outside our hotel window, apparently in celebration of a religious holiday. But that day was also our anniversary, so we decided that the beautiful fireworks must have been in our honor.

WINE WINE WINE

So when in Portugal what do wine geeks do? Drink Port. Well we aren’t really wine geeks and we don’t really like port, so we set out in search of good Portuguese table wines (what the locals call wine that is not port).

It turns out that Portugal makes some very good wine that very few people know about. We traveled to two wine regions – The Alentejo in the South and The Douro Valley in the North. The grape varieties are generally unique to Portugal and include such varieties as Tinto Roriz, Touriga Franca, Touriga National, Arinto … And most table wines are a blend of two or more of varieties with some having over six different grapes in them.

Alentejo is a newer region and produces the majority of Portuguese table wines. The wineries are larger and tend to focus on quantity, over quality. They were proud to tell us that they replace the older vines with newer ones when their production decreases (and the fruit quality improves). Most of the wine never sees oak, going almost directly from fermentation to bottling. Despite all of this, we did find some smaller wineries that produce good wines.

At dinner one night, we tasted an excellent wine and after talking with the sommelier found out the winery was within a few miles of the convent, converted into a hotel, where we were staying. The next morning we asked the desk if they could get us an appointment to see the winery and after a few calls we were confirmed for 7:00pm.

Finding the winery proved to be a challenge. The verbal directions we got were wrong, there was no signage for the winery and the people we asked on the street helped, but there was a language barrier. So after an hour of driving in circles we found the wine maker waiting for us out front of what looked like someone’s hacienda.

It turns out that it is a very small winery that isn’t open to the public and doesn’t normally accept visitors, but the winemaker had agreed to host us. It turned into an unbelievable night of tasting (drinking) wines, touring the facilities and talking that lasted until after 11:00 pm.

The winery “Feta-Petra” started in 2004 and have grown quickly, winning awards for their entry level “Sexy” brand and the top level Feta-Petra wine. Some of the wines are from traditional Portuguese varieties and others mix these varieties with new-world grapes. It is evident from the high-quality, fruit-forward wines that a lot of attention is paid to the vineyard and where other wineries are focused on high volume Feta Petra is making high quality.

After some land touring we ended up in Porto, and decided that we needed to give port wine a chance since we were in the home of port. We arranged a tour and tasting of some of the best ports. And after about three hours of learning about the history, process and types of port, we discovered that we did enjoy some ports. We tasted 10, 20, 30 and 40 year-old tawny ports and they were ok, but nothing we would drink. Then we tried some aged vintage port and found something we really liked. This port is closer to some of the high alcohol, very concentrated wines that we enjoy from California.

With our port experience behind us, we headed to the Douro Valley. The wines from Douro were more to our liking than the wines from Alentejo. Although the region is known for port, they make some excellent wines from the grapes that are not rated for high-quality port. What really blew us away was the landscape. This is the most beautiful wine regions we have seen. The valley is full of vines terraced into the steep hills. As we wound up the river in a small boat, we were amazed by the vineyards, clearly everything here is harvested by hand!

When we set out on this trip we had hoped to find a few good wines that we would be able to buy when we returned home. In the end, we had four cases of wine and contacts for four US distributors, so we can buy more wine when we get home. Oh and we have six bottles of port.

Previous Comments 

03 Aug 2010

Linda Stelmaszyk

Marvelous! I am trying to convince Steve to sail to Europe next year as we are not sailing this winter. I love your blogs and would like to talk about the passage as I love the adventure but too many days offshore become BORING for me. Email if you can. And if you need a boat sitter, we are available as I am sure by January when it is -20 in Lake Placid we will be saying “WHAT WERE WE THINKING!!!” Linda