Season 1 : Eating Europe
Episode 6
34 minutes – Porto, Portugal
I went to Porto expecting to drink port. I came home with a bottle of pink port, a new appreciation for Vinho Verde, and a firm opinion about a farmer’s rosé served from a tap in a 100-year-old tasca.
In this episode I cover everything I drank on my recent trip: Vinho Verde at the Mercado do Bolhão paired with sardines, the Alvarinho from the Dão region that I’ll be seeking out at home, and Espadal — the slightly sparkling farmer’s rosé on tap at Tasca da Badalhoca, known locally as the wine of the poor and considerably better than that suggests. We also go into the Pink Palace at WOW and taste five glasses of rosé including Mateus Rosé, with a proper look at where it came from and how it connects to the Espadal tradition. Then it’s on to port: the English connection, how fortification works, Ruby versus Tawny, the difference between vintage and blended, and why Late Bottled Vintage is where the value lies. Plus pink port and tonic, and why I think it might be the next Aperol Spritz.
T&C at WOW : Part of the World of Wine cultural complex in Vila Nova de Gaia.
Taylors Port cellars : Learn about the history of Port wine
Taste Porto : the food tour where I learnt about the pink wine on tap.
Transcript of the European Compass : a food and travel podcast : Episode 6
Episode 6 transcript | The European Compass, Eating Europe series
Welcome to the European Compass Podcast, the podcast where we explore the heart of Europe through its food, its markets and the stories behind every dish. I’m your host Julia Doust, and if you’ve ever planned a trip around a meal then you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in.
Okay so the last time we talked about Porto, we talked about my trip to Porto and what I ate, and we didn’t have time to talk about what I drank, which obviously in Porto is quite an important subject. So let’s have a look at what I drank.
Now anyone who knows me is going to know that I like wine. I like a glass of wine. I’m not going to pretend I am not sober. I have been called a lush occasionally in my life, so let’s call it that, let’s limit it to that. And I went to Porto with my friend, who is of a similar disposition, so we knew this was never going to be a fully sober trip. But we did learn quite a lot about wine when we were there. It wasn’t just about drinking it.
The Wine Experience at WOW
Now a lot of what we learned came from the Wine Experience. So the Wine Experience is a wine museum that’s part of the WOW complex. So in Porto, it’s actually not in Porto, it’s in Vila Nova de Gaia which is across the river. Which is where you’ve got Porto, you’ve got the river Douro, and the other side of the river, which is actually where all the wine, but the port and the wine warehouses are. There is a place called WOW, which was originally the WOW stood for World of Wine. It seems to be now just known as WOW, and it’s this huge complex, part of it used to be old wine warehouses, old port warehouses that have been renovated and turned into a cultural centre with five different museums and lots of restaurants and things like this. There’s details on my blog if you want to dig into this a bit deeper.
But part of this complex is a whole wine museum that goes through the making of wine, the history of wine, the important parts of why wine is what it is, different grape varieties. It’s really really good museum. It goes through things in a lot of detail, and it’s interesting, it’s really nicely laid out, it’s really beautiful photos. They’ve got a whole art gallery that they’ve done with different portraits of different types of grapes. They’ve got this massive big globe, this spinning lit up globe to show you where the wines are grown. Really good anyway.
This experience ended in a tasting, because all good wine experiences should. And it was really good because it was with a sommelier, with someone who actually knew about wine. It wasn’t just pouring a bit of wine into a glass. It was someone who knew about wine, knew about Portuguese wine, which is something I don’t know a lot about. I live in France, and therefore most of the wine I drink, I would say 90 odd percent of the wine I drink, is French. That’s partly because if you go into the supermarkets you will find rows and rows and rows of French wine, and you’ll find a little tiny section of foreign wine which covers the rest of the world. So we don’t really get a lot of foreign wine. We get French. So it’s nice to have a difference and see something different.
Vinho Verde
And the Portuguese wine, so this whole museum, part of the museum, talked about the different areas in Portugal where they grow the wine. And actually Portugal’s quite interesting in that it’s pretty much all over Portugal that they grow wine of one type or another. One of the exceptions is actually in Porto, interestingly enough. So the town I was in at this wine experience doesn’t actually grow any wine of its own, but it’s known for wine because the wine comes from up the Douro Valley and comes down into Porto to be shipped. So it’s got a reputation for wine, even though the wine is actually grown at least 80 km away further up the river.
So this museum went through all the different wine areas that make wine in Portugal, and then we had the tasting. So we had three different wines that we tasted. One was what’s called a Vinho Verde. Now that translates into green wine, and you might be mistaken for thinking that that’s different from white wine or red wine, that there’s green wine. No. This is a region, it’s a separate region in Portugal that makes Vinho Verde, and it can be either white or red. The white has got a green tinge to it, it’s very pale with a little green tinge to it. It’s also got a little bit of a spritz to it. It’s a really nice wine if chilled on a hot day. It’s lovely. It has tastes of fruit, it’s fruity flavours, sort of melon and gooseberry sort of flavours. Really nice.
And we had that again. So that was at the wine museum, and we had the same wine, well another Vinho Verde, in the market. So in the main market hall, the Mercado do Bolhão, there’s one or two stands that are selling wine by the glass. This is something that I normally, if you see wine in a market in Europe, there’s because there’s a bar and people sit at the bar and drink the wine at the bar. This was slightly different, because they were selling wine by the glass and then people were wandering off with the glasses and just bringing them back when they’d finished. So there was one area that was a sort of general seating area, there was a standing section, and people were just wandering round as well with these glasses.
And what was interesting is these glasses were generous glasses. So in France wine tends to be served in quite moderate sized glasses, they’re not big portions, and certainly not big compared to what you might find in the UK for example. Porto was much more similar to UK sort of portions of wine, big glasses, big portions. Which is great, not complaining, believe me.
So we had the Vinho Verde at from this stand on the market, which is opposite a sardine stand. And the sardine stand was selling plates, so they sell all their canned sardines and everything, and they were selling these plates of sardines on crackers. I talked about this in the previous podcast. And when we ate these we had this glass of Vinho Verde, and it was absolutely perfect, because it was a really dry fresh wine. This was a lunchtime. It went really well with the sardines. And I think probably the only problem with it is it goes down a little bit too easily. It’s very very easy to drink.
I wouldn’t drink this with a meal, not other than like the sardines as an apéritif. But I wouldn’t drink it sitting down to an actual main course, let’s say. It’s an apéritif sort of wine to my mind anyway.
Alvarinho
Back to the wine experience. So the other wine we had was from the Dão region, and that was an Alvarinho. Now Alvarinho is the same one, they have the same grape in Spanish called Albariño. I think my pronunciation of Spanish isn’t going to be great, but it’s the same grape variety, it’s just a different pronunciation.
And the Alvarinho is really nice. Now that is a wine that you could drink with a meal, and we did. We had it with a meal, we had it later on in the week when we had the cataplana. We had some Alvarinho. This is a lovely wine. If you are going to buy any white wine from Porto, from Portugal sorry, look out for the Alvarinho. That would be my tip, and it’s certainly something that I’m going to be looking out for in the future. I found it really nice. I tend to like wine like a sauvignon, I like my wine dry. I do like some flavour to it, and this was really good. It was really nice. It’s not oaked like a chardonnay, but it wasn’t a heavily oaked wine and it was dry. So I was very very happy with this.
The Pink Palace and Mateus Rosé
And then so of these, these are still on these three wines that we tasted at the Wine Experience. And the third was a port. Of course, we’re in Porto, we have to talk about port. Now I’m going to come back to port, simply because it’s quite a long technical, lots of things to talk about. I just want to finish off with the wine first, and then we’ll come back to port.
So as part of the WOW complex, the other thing they have is something called the Pink Palace. And this is a bit of fun. They’ve got various sections where you can take Instagram worthy photographs, and it’s all a bit of fun. But it also goes into the history and the detail behind rosé wine, and the whole experience includes five glasses of rosé wine. Supposedly little glasses. They weren’t that little, let me say.
Now this was good, this was nice. This started, they started with a glass of wine from Aix-en-Provence, French wine, which is slightly strange given that everything in the whole section was to do with Portuguese wine, and the whole WOW complex is all about Portugal. But the purpose of having the wine from Aix-en-Provence was because that’s where rosé started. So their point was, this is the grandfather of rosé wines, this is where rosé wine started. And then you can come into how that spread into Portugal, and how the Portuguese have dealt with rosé.
And then we went on from that to possibly the most famous Portuguese wine, at least if you grew up in the UK in the 1980s, 70s or 80s I suppose, and that’s Mateus Rosé. Now Mateus Rosé was an ubiquitous wine in that time period in the UK. It’s got a very distinctive bottle, quite often ended up with candles in it with wax running down. And this isn’t a sophisticated wine. This is a bordering on sweet rosé wine, with a little bit of fizz behind it. It’s nothing complicated, it’s just easy, not sophisticated wine. And you can still get it, they still make rosé at Mateus. They sell it in my supermarket actually. But it’s fallen out of favour. It’s not trendy, the wine snobs will snub it and say no, that’s not real wine. And to some extent they’re right.
Espadal: The Farmer’s Rosé
It’s not this isn’t wine from one particular region. So there is a pink wine that is made in Portugal in the Vinho Verde and that sort of section of Portugal, and the Minho I think, where they do make a pink wine, a rosé wine. And they make a rosé wine that’s again got this slight fizz. And it was known as the wine of the poor.
We had some of this in a bar called Tasca da Badalhoca, as part of a Taste Porto food tour. And they took us to this bar called Tasca da Badalhoca, where they have rosé wine on tap. It’s not in a bottle. It’s on tap and it’s called Espadal, or Espadeiro. Espadal. And that’s actually the grape variety that’s used. And the guide on our tour referred to it as being a farmer’s wine. This is a wine that the farmers make, they put it in a barrel, they pull it on the tap. It’s quaffing wine, it’s just what the agriculturalists and the farmers drank.
It’s got a salmon sort of colour, it’s lively, it’s wild fruit sort of notes, that sort of thing. But it needs to be cold. This is not something you can leave to warm up, it needs to be cold. I think it’s probably because it isn’t that sophisticated, and that would show up if it were warmer.
And I think they make something similar in the north of Spain as well, called Rías Baixas. I think it’s essentially the same thing. Now from what I gather, Mateus Rosé kind of came from this idea, and they started in the Douro Valley. And they managed to make this rosé using this same grape, Espadal. It was a blended wine but was using this grape. And it became popular, and they didn’t have enough to sell, so they actually moved further south, started with some other grape varieties, and made this blended wine that has the same sort of character as this farmer’s wine. But it’s not, Mateus Rosé isn’t this Espadal wine, or at least it isn’t anymore. Maybe at the very very beginning it might have been, but it really isn’t what you’re buying.
And I think the Espadal was actually nicer. Was nice. It might be because it was on tap and we were in a bar and it was cold. But to me it was a more pleasing, I don’t think it’s a sweet, which might be why, because I’m not a big fan of the sweet.
Worth looking out for if you are in Porto. The bar is called Tasca da Badalhoca. I’ll put a link down below. Look it up and try it, because it’s a bit different. It’s not something, because it’s in a barrel, you can’t buy it elsewhere.
Terras de Cister: Portuguese Sparkling Wine
So we’re still in this Pink Palace experience, and we’ve had the Mateus rosé, and then we had a sparkling wine. Which I had not heard of, sparkling wine from Portugal. Obviously you’ve got champagne from France, you’ve got cava from Spain, you’ve got prosecco from Italy. Well Portugal do make a sparkling wine, made in this, it’s the same method that they make it in. Now I think this is called Terras de Cister. I’m not sure if that’s the region or the name of the wine. But it’s nice. I would say more like a cava than a champagne. But it’s nice. I’m not going to seek it out, let’s say, but just be aware that it does exist.
Pink Port
And then in the Pink Palace we had a glass of pink port. And pink port until very recently didn’t exist. Pink port doesn’t really exist. Taylor’s, well it isn’t Taylor’s, it’s Croft, it’s part of the same group. Croft decided to try and make a pink port, and they’ve made it and it’s nice. It’s really nice.
So this is nice if you like white port as an apéritif, which is quite common in France. Like white port is used as an apéritif wine. And if you like white port as an apéritif, and you like rosé wine, then you’re probably going to like the pink port. It’s very nice, it’s very refreshing. I would, in fact I say I would buy it. I did. I bought some from the airport on the way back.
Worth knowing by the way, if you are in Porto when you’ve only got cabin luggage, there’s a really good shop at the airport. So once you’re through security you can buy bottles of port there and you can take those on the plane, because they’re duty free and therefore you’re allowed within your luggage allowance. So that’s just a little tip. If you want to take some port back you can, but you buy it at the airport. And they had a good choice, they had Taylor’s and Dalva and all the other brands at the airport. They had a bit of wine as well, but it was more port.
So it’s a pink port, and one of the things that they are doing with the pink port is they are then mixing it with other things to make cocktails. They’re using it as a cocktail ingredient. And part of that is to try and modernise port, because port is a bit old people wine, and so they’re trying to modernise it. And that’s part of the reason why they brought out this pink port.
And the other thing that they’re trying to do to modernise is they’re trying to push Port and Tonic. And now sometimes with the pink ports, we had it at the Yeatman, they are selling pink port and tonic. And at the T&C restaurant we had white port and tonic. And the white port and tonic is apparently amongst younger people in Porto it’s a drink of choice. And I can understand why. If you like gin and tonic but find that gin and tonic is maybe a little bit strong, then port and tonic is the perfect solution. Mix it half and half with tonic, plenty of ice, lemon juice, little bit of mint if you like, and it makes for the perfect summer apéritif.
I’m thinking I’m not a big fan of Aperol Spritz. For example this would be a good replacement for it. Also for something like Pimm’s and lemonade, this is a really good replacement for it. Port and tonic, I think it could be the next sort of trend. That’s my prediction. Which suits me, as I say I don’t like Aperol Spritz. So if they can go towards port and tonic, that would be right up my street.
So other than the pink and white port, so the port and tonic by the way, Taylor’s use their Chip Dry port. So Taylor’s do two different ports, they do Chip Dry and they do a classic white. And they use their Chip Dry for the port and tonic. So if you’ve got a choice between different white ports, choose the dry.
Port: The Full Story
So now onto port. Now one thing I will say about port in Porto is they take it very very seriously. There are many many port warehouses, port lodges, that you can visit, that you can do a tour, and you can then do some tasting. And we went to Taylor’s. I do not know enough about port to know whether Taylor’s is the best port or not good port. I really don’t know. I don’t know enough about port. I feel like I now know a lot more about port than I did a week ago.
So Taylor’s have been around for 300 years. They’re actually an English company, which is why the name Taylor’s. It doesn’t sound Portuguese at all. It’s not Portuguese, it’s English. And the reason, this is how port came about, was that the English were getting their wine from Bordeaux, and there was a war, an argument between the English and the French, and so the English needed to go and find some wine elsewhere. And so they came down to Portugal, and they found the wines in the Douro Valley. And they wanted to make it so that it was more easy to transport and would last longer, and so they started fortifying the wines from the Douro Valley.
And by fortifying it, that means that they’ve added in a brandy or an eau de vie to stop the fermentation, which makes it stronger as well. So a normal wine is 13%, and by adding in the brandy they’re taking it up to about 20%. It stops the fermentation, makes it far easier to transport and to keep.
And so the English were doing this in Portugal, and then they were bringing the barrels down the river to Porto. And when they put them on the ships they were used to having wine from Bordeaux on their ships. And now they’ve suddenly got wine from Porto on their ships, because that’s where the wine got put on the ship. And so that became the name of the wine. Port doesn’t, there’s no wine grown in Porto. The wine grows up the valley in the Douro Valley, but it took the name port from Porto.
So these English, they then decided that they wanted a wine that they knew what it was going to be like. So they wanted this to be quite a uniform product. So they started blending, and they started blending the wines to make a product so that when the product arrived in England, the people drinking it in England knew exactly what they were going to get. So whether it had been a hot summer or a wet summer, or whether there’d been a frost or not, the wine itself tasted the same. And so they blended it all out to get this very uniform product that they then sell.
And so there’s these big wine warehouses, port warehouses, and there’s just barrels and barrels and barrels. Just immense, these are immense things, with huge numbers of barrels in this warehouse. And then they keep them in the barrels for a certain number of years, and then they blend it to make the different grades of port.
Ruby, Tawny and the Blended Ports
Now I’ve learned a lot more about port than I used to know, honestly. So there are different types of port. You will see port with numbers on, 10, 20, 30. Now those numbers represent the average age of the wine in the bottle. It doesn’t mean that that wine is exactly 10 years old. What it means is that when they blended that wine, the average age of the wines that they used to blend it was at least 10 years.
And we heard some tales from other producers where there’s a little bit of snobbery around this. Of the, oh well Taylor’s when they bottle it it’s more like 10 years, whereas when we bottle it it’s more like 12 or 13 years. I’m not convinced that there’s a whole load of difference. The difference is going to be in the skill of the person blending, the skill of getting that blend just right so that it tastes like the product that you expect.
So these barrels are all kept in these warehouses up until the time that they’re blended, and then they’re blended into 10, 20, 30 year wine.
There’s a difference between Ruby and Tawny port. So again all the names are English, they’re not Portuguese names on these port bottles. And the white, the language used around port are English names. They call them Ruby and Tawny, they call them red and white. It’s all English names because of this English link and where it originally came from.
So the difference between Tawny and Ruby is that Ruby, the wine is kept in bigger barrels, so it has less contact with the barrel, the wood of the barrel itself. It has less contact with the air, because these barrels aren’t hermetically sealed, it breathes. So there’s less oxidation that goes on. So the Ruby is a darker colour and not as oaked.
The Tawny ports are kept in the smaller barrels, which means that they get more oxidation, they get more contact with the wood, and so they become more oaked. And the fact they’ve got more oxidation means that they end up paler. So the colour actually changes as it oxidises. So that’s why the Tawny, whilst a lot of people say it’s a better port because of this more rounded flavour, is actually paler. So if you see a dark port it’s probably a Ruby port.
I think the flavour is just a matter of taste to be perfectly honest. I prefer the Tawny, but I don’t think there’s, I think it just depends. And I could see if you were drinking port with cheese, I could see that there would be a case of depending on which cheese you are eating, you need to drink a different port. But that would be a whole new ball game. If you had a whole cheese board and then different ports to go with the different cheese, I think that might be real specialist stuff.
So those are your 10, 20, 30 year bottles. So they’re not vintage, they’re blended.
Vintage Port and Late Bottled Vintage
Now then you get something called Vintage Port. Vintage port means that it comes from one specific year. But unlike wine, where you get a vintage for every year and then you get told well that’s a good vintage or that’s a bad vintage, so a Bordeaux you’re going to get told that this is a 2020 Bordeaux and whether or not that was a good year for Bordeaux wine. In port, they only have vintage wines on exceptional years. So they don’t put vintage wine on every year, they only put vintage wine in the good years.
So when we were there, the previous good year had been about seven years previously. But that’s not seven years from this year, from 2026. It’s seven years from the wine they were bottling at the time, which was 2024. So the previous vintage was I believe a 2017.
Now not all the port houses don’t all have exactly the same years. A lot of them seem to agree that this is a good year. Whether they all talk about it, I think they might have a meeting. Some port houses apparently release other vintages if they have a particularly good year. I know I’ve seen a 2019, but it’s by no means every year. I think the latest I have seen is a 2019.
And when we were there, there was a discussion about whether 2024 was going to be named as a vintage year. And this is quite a big thing, because vintage port can be sold for a lot more money than ordinary port, because it’s from an exceptional year and because they don’t blend it. It has a character that you don’t get from the blended wine. So the very best port is vintage port. And I believe 2024 has been now named a vintage year.
So if you want to get the best out of a vintage port, you need to lay it down and wait. And then it will develop, and it gets better as it gets older. The longer you wait the better it will get, because they don’t filter it. So a blended port is filtered before it goes into the bottle, so it doesn’t need decanting, but it’s not going to age any more than it already is once it’s in the bottle. A vintage port isn’t filtered, which means that the flavour develops in the bottle. So as it gets older it will develop that flavour and become more and more mellow.
So the very best port, if you’re looking for a good port, is to go for a vintage port and lay it down, or buy one that’s older, an older vintage port.
Now there is then something else. I believe it was Taylor’s that started this, something called Late Bottled Vintage. Now the late bottled vintage, rather than bottling it and then keeping it in the bottles, they keep it in the barrels. And they keep it in these big, massive big barrels, the biggest barrels we saw were the late bottled vintage barrels. And they keep it in those for years and then bottle it. And that’s then called a late bottled vintage.
The difference between a late bottled vintage and a vintage is that it is filtered. It won’t develop the flavour. But it’s still got the characters of this exceptional year. It’s still got the different flavours that you would get from that year, rather than being a blended wine.
So the recommendation to us, and I think this is a good recommendation, is that if you are looking for a good port but you’re not planning on laying it down for a long time, then a late bottled vintage offers very good value for money. That is where you are going to get the best value for money for the flavour you’re looking for. So that’s what I will be looking for in the future. Late bottled vintage port.
I don’t think I’m ever going to be such an expert in port that the vintage ports are going to be worthwhile of my money. And that’s not to say that I’m not going to drink them if someone offers them to me, because I’m sure I will.
Final Thoughts
So that pretty much covers port and the wine we drank in Porto. I will say, if you are going to do a port wine tour, the one at Taylor’s had the advantage of having a lovely garden for when you do your tasting. So you visit the port wine lodges and then go into this really nice garden. I think you can access the garden without going into the lodge, but I might be wrong. You can have your tasting there, and you can get a white and a Tawny and a Ruby, and so you can taste the difference for yourself. And obviously then there’s a shop where they sell their wine.
So that is Porto and its wine, which covers and finishes off our series on Porto.
My takeaway from the trip was probably the pink port. I know it’s not sophisticated, but pink port with some tonic, it’s just such a lovely apéritif. And because it’s not as strong as a gin and tonic, and because it’s a longer drink, so it actually lasts longer than drinking rosé wine. So that’s now in my cupboard. It has the advantage of not going off, so you can open it, have one glass and keep it in your cupboard. Which I think is a very good plus point. So always have a bottle of pink or white port in your cupboard, so if you need to do an apéritif for people, it’s there ready.
Thanks for joining me on the European Compass podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a fellow food traveller, or a wine traveller, and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, Bon Appétit and happy travels.