Quinta da Alorna Touriga Nacional 2015
I have to confess that I was rather intrigued by what it could mean. Living in Germany and having contact with German producers and wine sellers has given me quite some different perspectives on what words to describe wine can mean.
The only way to find it out was to open it and let it accompany the beginning of the asparagus season.
The first contact with it was already promising:
A nice garnet colour and a rich scent of berries have set me in the perfect mood to what was to come. In the mouth it was both fruity and fresh but also with a very balanced and round body with a slight wooden taste. The intense berries taste was amazing, revealing all the potential of Touriga Nacional.
A wine full of potential with a strong gastronomic character.
To embody even more this experience, I would recommend the short story Mini-Marts by Martin Avery.
Enjoy it!
I have a
friend who claims he has written an entire dump-truckful of short stories. A
dump-truck can hold about seven tons of paper. That's a lot of short stories.
Like musicians who practise their instruments
hour, after hour, day after day, we pound away at the keyboards of our
typewriters. Tip tap. Tip tip. Tip tap tip. Making stories. Only we do not
generally go over the same 40 stories again and again. We go over each story
only until it is finished. A lot of stories, however unfortunately, refuse to
be finished. These are simply abandoned. By the dump-truckful.
Or maybe we are more like shoemakers, or
little old men who spend their days in tiny shops making toys for children.
Only these craftsmen sell their creations in their shops. When you go into a
toy shop, the toys are all neatly arranged on the shelves which line the walls and if they do
not have price tags on them, the toy-maker has prices in his head.
If you ever
go into a writer's workshop, you will not see stories lined up on shelves against
the wall with price tags on them. And the writer will not have the prices of
his stories fixed in his head, either. What you will probably see is a cramped room littered
with crumpled-up pieces of paper, other people's books, and, there in the corner,
dressed in black and white, the writer. He looks about as much like a
businessman as he does a truck driver.
And on the
wall, you will see the telephone number of a literary agent who knows a driver
with a truck, who comes around s once a year to haul most of the stories away.
They are then buried in various little magazines read by other craftsmen in the
same predicament.
There should be a section in the corner store
for all of these stories, or a few shelves in the local mini-mart . Then you
could pick up a few short stories when you did the afternoon shopping. Your
shopping list would read:
2 tomatoes
1 loaf of bread ( 60 % )
a case of Cokes
cigarettes
milk
a short story
“Don't
forget the ice-cream , Mom . And pick me up a short story about a dog?"
How would you like to run down the corner and
get me a six-pack of Ernest Hemingway?”
Standing in
front of the short-story section at Becker’s or Mac’s Milk, you would pick over
authors like fresh fruit and vegetables:
“That
lettuce is wilted.” “Not another one of those stories by Morley Callaghan.” “Look!
Zucchini! It’s been so long since we had good zucchini!” “ Great: Here’s some
Richard Brautigan.” “ Is this asparagus imported?” “Have you read any Jorge
Luis Borges?” “These grapefruits are American grade ‘A’.” “Who is Leonard
Michaels?” “This corn is local, and so are the potatoes: I can hardly wait to
sink my teeth into them.”
17 / 20
Country: Portugal
Region: Tejo
Grapes: Touriga Nacional
13%
Winemaker: Martta Reis Simões
Website: http://alorna.pt/Vinhos/Quinta-da-Alorna/Quinta-da-Alorna-Touriga-Nacional-Tinto-2015
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