On the off chance that you happened to see my last wine column, you would’ve read that, for the first time ever, I experienced a real wine region, in a real wine country: Rías Baixas in Galicia, Spain.
You would have also read how my wife got violently ill in Spain and how I assumed it was something she ate or the water. It was not. Was it cyclospora? Could be. There were no reported cases of it in Europe at the time. Maybe she was Patient Zero. But that would make me Patient One, because the second I set my bag down in the hotel of the second wine region I would ever visit in my life, I declared “I’m not sick.”
I steeled myself and proceeded to the streets of Porto, Portugal, just South of Rías Baixas, in search of what I believed might be my last meal of the trip.
That meal was an incredible fish stew and a bottle of wine made from the same grape as the wines of Rías Baixas, Albariño. But, being Portugal, they spell it differently and say it a little differently too. They call it Alvarinho.
This wine was harvested just north of us, between where we left Spain and where we were in Portugal, in an area the Portuguese call Vinho Verde. It literally translates to “green wine,” but has less to do with the color and more to do with how young the wine is when it’s released.
The meal and the wine were delicious but my wife and I knew that my gastrointestinal system was a ticking time bomb. We barely made it back to one of the most beautiful and romantic hotels I’ve ever been to before my bomb detonated. For the next 12 hours straight, I would not be on our hotel room balcony looking out at the twin cities of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia, nor roaming their glorious streets. I would be best friends with the porcelain throne and the well-appointed marble tiling of the casa de banho. At least the marble was mercifully cold.
A dizzying day latter, I was brave enough to attempt a boat ride down the Douro River between Porto and Gaia. What’s a little seasickness when you’ve cycled through cyclospora? Porto, as the name would suggest, is famous for the fortified wine known as “Port.” There is also a legend that the two villages of Porto plus Gaia is how the nation of Portugal got its name. This seems to be false, but it’s a nice story.
Porto is likely where Magellan was born, so it’s been an important port for a very long time. These villages were, and are, the economic epicenter of the Port wine industry. In 1926, the Portuguese government decreed that all Port wine needed to be stored in Gaia, despite the fact that some winemakers had already been storing it in Gaia for decades, if not centuries.
Port was essentially an industry for the Brits, which took off in the later half of the 17th century. The grapes were shipped south via boat from the Douro River Valley and vinified in Gaia. The British loved the wine and, in order to help it stay preserved for travel to England, they added a clear, neutral, grape-based spirit, called aguardente.
This is why Port can last longer after you’ve opened it and it is so friggin’ boozy. I love Port, as a rule. I used to drink it with my Italian grandmother after holiday meals and the high levels of liquor prompted her to tell family stories that none of us had ever heard. But seeing as my body was still in recovery mode, I essentially had to choke the Port down, just so I wouldn’t miss out on the experience of drinking Port in Porto.
I mustered the intestinal fortitude to visit the Port wine house of Kopke, which bills itself as the oldest Port Wine House. It traces their history, not back to the British, but to a German named Nicolau Kopke, a baron and consul general who settled in Porto in the 1630s. He began exporting the wines back to Germany, and by the 1780s his family had bought a farm in the Douro Valley and was making wines.
The Port industry is divided into houses or lodges. Literal buildings set in a row along the Gaia side of the river. Kopke stands alongside other lodges with names you might recognize: Taylor’s, Graham’s, Ramos Pinto, Sandeman. There is no doubt I would’ve tried many more of them, if my GI had been A-OK. But alas, Kopke was almost more than I could handle.
The wines were excellent. I tried a flight of five, which was ambitious given my condition. And my wife, even in the best of stomachs, doesn’t love Port. I had both red and white Ports in the flight. The reds are most often what people think of when they think of Port. They are often classified into Ruby or Tawny categories, given how long they’ve been aged and in how big a barrel.
However, Kopke’s DOC Branco White Reserve 2023 was excellent. My wife did smell it and took a sip. She had one of the best tasting notes I’ve heard lately when she said “It smells exactly like when you blow up a pool float.” She was right. And strangely, that’s what made it excellent. Ports always have a little sweetness (or a lot of sweetness). This lighter white was easier on my stomach than the heavier stuff like the Colheita 2011 single harvest Tawny. My mind knew it was so good. My body did not allow me to enjoy it to the level that I wished.
Nor did it allow me to enjoy the intellectually delicious tastes at Cafe Moreira in the tiny fishing village in Gaia called São Pedro da Afurada. The chef was grilling bacalhau on the street. My mouth managed to choke down some grilled sardines. I witnessed the table next to us eating from a giant tub of shellfish. Lobster, clams, razor clams. All I could do was stare, longingly. And also, knowingly. It would’ve killed me.
We then walked the narrow cobblestone streets of Afurada, where the facades of fishermen’s homes are beautifully tiled in individualized colors. Legend has it that they are color-coded so when the fishermen would come home drunk, they could recognize which house was theirs. If only I had been well enough to make myself unwell like those fishermen.
Despite my illness in Portugal, and my wife’s illness in Spain, we managed to snatch a vacation victory out of the vomiting jaws of defeat. I’m grateful that I finally got to explore real wine country. And I’m looking forward to a time when I can return and truly pay tribute to Dionysus, the god of wine, rather than paying tribute to the porcelain god I had my head bowed to for 12 hours straight.