If you\u2019ve read my stuff over the years, you may recall that I like to dive into places that grip my wine imagination. So in the past I, and my wife, Karen, have lived in Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Venice and Piedmont for varying lengths of time, our minimum residence three months. If there\u2019s a privilege to being a wine writer, this is it. Deciding where to go is not an entirely rational thing. Although all sorts of places appeal, the decision to set up house elsewhere is fundamentally emotional. Something about the culture, the landscape, the people and, not least, the wine, has to exert a siren call, an irresistible pull. That, in the proverbial nutshell, is what happened with Portugal. For all the time I\u2019ve spent in Europe over the decades\u2014we\u2019ve bicycled for months at a time in France alone, never mind living for long stretches in Italy\u2014I have to confess that we never bothered with Portugal. The wines, apart from Port, for so long seemed lackluster. You could taste the lack of ambition. But in the course of tasting, I began to receive different messages in the bottle, as it were. Something seemed to be stirring, or so the wines suggested. So in the past year or so, we visited Portugal twice. I loved what we saw, who we met, what we ate and, above all, what I tasted. So I began to investigate Portuguese wines more closely. What at first appeared promising\u2014and extremely enjoyable\u2014turned out to be nothing less than revolutionary. I came to what I freely confess is an emotional conclusion: Portugal is arguably the most exciting wine place on the planet today. Now, whether that\u2019s demonstrably, provably so is beside the point. It\u2019s how I as a wine lover, a wine taster, a wine drinker, felt. And that\u2019s all that matters for any of us, isn\u2019t it? \u201cLet\u2019s live in Portugal for a few months,\u201d I proposed to my wife. \u201cWhy not?\u201d she agreeably replied. So now, as I write this, we\u2019re newly settled into pretty nice digs in the Ribeira district of Porto. (And, yes, everything about this jaunt is on my own dime, just in case you were wondering.) Much as we enjoyed Lisbon, there was no question that for us Porto would be \u201chome.\u201d It\u2019s just the right size (1.3 million people in the larger urban area); it\u2019s an ancient city that has retained much of its architecture intact (the Ribeira zone where we live is a UNESCO World Heritage site); and not least, it\u2019s the closest city to the great Douro wine region. That last fact is not insignificant. In the same way that you\u2019ve really got to see the Grand Canyon sometime before you die, the same\u2014for wine lovers, anyway\u2014applies to the Douro wine zone. It is, in a word, boggling. Really, I\u2019ve never seen anything quite like it: more vast than I had imagined, more forbidding in its endless stone vineyard terraces, and just plain more improbable than any other wine area I\u2019ve seen. I mean, what kind of a wine area has growers using dynamite just to create a hole in which to plant a grapevine? It\u2019s scary beautiful. And now it\u2019s changing. The Douro has famously been consecrated for more than three centuries to just one wine: Port. But the past few decades have not been kind to the Port business. The modern mass palate turned away from it, although there\u2019s still a sizable number of drinkers who enjoy at least a sip from time to time. Make no mistake: Port is hardly about to disappear. That noted, there\u2019s no question that the Douro zone is changing. One (rough) fact tells all: In the past 15 years or so, about half of the wine production from the larger Douro zone\u2014an area that extends beyond the boundaries designated for Port production\u2014is now table wine. That\u2019s really incredible. I know of no other historically significant wine zone that has transformed to anywhere near that degree. So I wanted to be close to the Douro action. The table wines emerging from the Douro can be thrilling. Many\u2014most even\u2014are still works in progress. After all, nobody knew how to make table wine in the Douro. But they\u2019re learning mighty fast. The best wines are stunners, truly world-class in their originality, flavor distinction, character, depth and finesse. The dry white Douro wines can be surprisingly compelling. It\u2019s surprising because the place is take-your-breath-away hot in the summer. (One winegrower said to me: \u201cThe Douro is eight months of paradise and four months of hell.\u201d) So how can the white wines be so crisply good? Elevation. The best whites come from old vines grown in elevations upwards of 2,000 feet. So the Douro is mighty interesting. But it\u2019s not the real reason why I\u2019ve chosen to take time to live in Portugal. It\u2019s because of the grapes. Portugal is home to a dazzling number of indigenous grape varieties that create wines of supreme originality. You\u2019re looking at red grapes such as Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinto Roriz, Baga and hundreds of others, and white grapes such as Arinto, Viosinho, Rabigato, C\u00f3dega do Larinho and Gouveio, among many others. Until very recently, the Portuguese did a pretty poor job with this patrimony. Too often the wines were dirty-tasting, from old, unclean barrels. The winemaking was crude, the ambition for greatness non-existent. No more. Portugal is now gushing with stunning wines\u2014and yes, stunning deals. Call me a value hound, but except for a tiny handful of reach-for-the-sky wines (and every wine nation needs those, too), Portugal very likely now offers some of the greatest wine values on the market today. The reason is easily grasped: Portugal\u2019s achievement is still recent, and the word hasn\u2019t quite made the rounds. That\u2019s why I\u2019m here. And that\u2019s why you\u2019ll be hearing yet more. (And no, we don\u2019t have a guest room.)<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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It may well be. That\u0092s why I moved there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-sem-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viniportugal.leadershipbt.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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