Wine Fictions

 My relation with white Douro wines is sort of recent as I have always somehow neglected them without any specific reason for it.  I confess I have been trying to find an explanation for it, but I just can't. Still, as soon as I have started trying them, it did not took me long before I have fallen in love with some of its most representative grapes such as Viosinho, Rabigato or Verdelho due to the way they reflect a particularly special terroir which has already fascinated me with its reds.  To the referred grapes, this Quinta da Pedra Escrita also has Alvarinho, which often appears as one of the star grapes of the Vinho Verde region and the "foreign" Viognier. In short, this is an impressively complex wine which offers an incredible explosion of different tastes and dynamics when we are drinking it.  On the one hand the sweet fruity tastes of wildflowers and grapefruit that Rabigato and Viognier give and on the other the fascinating minerality that both Verdelho an...

 More than fifty posts after I have started this blog, I am finally going to make my considerations about a sparkling wine.  The reason I have taken such a long time to do it is my personal reluctance about sparkling wines. They are simply not my kind of thing, even though I am surrounded by several friends who defend it with great enthusiasm and always try to persuade me wrong. One of the attempts was to try this Astronauta Baga 2015, produced by Aníbal Coutinho and his fascinating project Astronaut. This Baga was, in fact, produced in the lands belonging to Caves da Montanha which have some of the first sparkling wines that have called my attention in an action by Wines of Portugal in Hamburg for a couple of years.  Once I have tried it, I have to confess that I was absolutely amazed.  Its fine and delicate citrus taste with voluminous notes of vanilla allied with an incredibly perfect and dry ending have surprised and seduced me from the very first moment. Being a...

I know that I often refer to the visual impact of a bottle in our perception of its content but somehow I just can not dissociate both. In Portuguese it is said that "the eyes also eat" and that is absolutely true not only in this Quinta do Portal Colheita as in all the other wines of Quinta do Portal. I do strongly recommend you to have a look at their portfolio and enjoy their artwork. About this Colheita I have to say that the first thing that has impressed me was its freshness and livelihood as I was expecting a rather more heavy and dense Douro wine.  With vivid red fruits and floral notes  it is an explosion of spring in your mouth with a long and persistent ending. According to the enologue it is also recommendable to let it age for a while in the bottle which has made me directly get another one as I am particularly curious to see how it will keep on developing.  I may have been too precipitated on opening it so soon, but I can also recommend it as it has matched ...

The other day a friend has invited me for an online wine tasting that he was organizing. Theme: Portugal. I have to confess that at first I was a bit sceptical about how you could organize such a thing and how your personal perception and enjoyment of it could be.  About the organization I have to confess that it was with a sort of childish joy that I have given the bottle I have selected for the tasting and half an hour later got 12 small bottles properly numbered. This excitement kept on growing till the beginning of the tasting.  From the twelve participants I knew only three but that was not a problem as we soon got to the purpose of the evening, discussing in a rather passionate way the wines that we were coming across. None of the participants, except the organizer, knew which wines we were trying, giving it a very similar feeling of a blind tasting. From the beginning it became clear that most of the participants did not really have too much experience with Portuguese w...