1) After a spinach omelette and plate of Portuguese baked goodies, it was time to bolt into the car for the long drive into the Douro Valley. The rain was pouring down in the city, needed considering all the wildfires. But it gradually lessened starting about 20 minutes outside Porto.
2) Marco, today’s Nice Young Man with a Car, and I kept up a fairly spirited conversation about the weather, the Douro Valley, and other things. But my mind found its way outside the window — especially as we neared the valley proper. Clouds or smoke streaked the ridges of the hills and terraces around us.
2a) As we were leaving Marco described the road we would be traveling on as “risky.” What he really meant was that the last bit of the road (I think after the village of Pinhao) was very narrow and curving in the mountains. There was a great deal of twisting and turning, reminding me of family vacations driving through the Ozarks. The sun was out by now, and truly — this area is so beautiful.
3) Stepping out of the car at Quinta Nova de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, I was struck by how long I’d been in a very active and crowded city, and how beautiful it was to be in this expansive and quiet valley of terraces and twisty roads.
4) I joined the small tour group just as we were escorted into room where the vats for the wine were. The guide explained that the room was set up to mimic the landscape of the valley, with a lower tier of concrete vats and an upper tier of smaller metal vats, each curved like the mountainside terraces. All taupes and beiges and no ornamentation, I felt this room would be paradise for minimalists.
5) We then saw the square 18th-century troughs were the grapes are stomped, and were led down a flight of stairs in to the wine library. Interestingly, in front of each bank of wine stores, the floor is sand to prevent breakage — genius. After we were shown through the next room where the wooden wine casks are stored, we entered the shop and a gravel terrace with folding tables overlooking the valley. The others, who were overnight guests, proceeded with their plans . . .
Note the sand floors at the edges.
6) . . . and my private wine tasting began. I think oenophiles must be like balletomanes, constantly comparing the performances of their favorites to promising newcomers. Four beautiful glasses were put before me on a printed placemat, and one by one the guide poured out four red wines, explaining how each was gathered and prepared. Talking about wine is so parodied — I don’t remember which comic said “light, but not insipid,” and of course Monty Python’s Australian cultural attaché famously said one wine “had a bouquet like an aborigine’s aampit.” The only one of my silly verbal ornaments I remember was about the second wine: “This wine wants to have a conversation . . . but I don’t think I want to invite anyone else to be a part of it.”
You can see the white truck rattling down the road at left.
7) I was left alone on this gravel terrace under a pergola with these four exceptional wines and a commanding view flooded with clear sunshine. I fell into a dream state (could this surprise anyone?) in which I found myself thinking a lot about my father, and — despite how very different we are — how much more like him I have become.
7a) Sound became prominent in this atmosphere of silent peace. A lone white truck rattling down the road across the valley, probably full of metal wine casks. Birdsong. Eventually voices from inside the shop behind me. Was there a brief moment of pre-recorded piano music? And then the guide returned to escort me to the restaurant for lunch.
Amuse bouche.
8) At this point I was the only diner, and I was shown a table away from the windows, but with a lovely view of the valleys on the other side. The most wonderful part of all this was the quiet in this low-ceilinged room. I settled into a comfortable chair and was very conscious of sitting up straight without effort, hands crossed in my lap, expectant.
Starter.
8a) And then a little poem of a luncheon was served to me, every course paired with an exquisite wine:
Braised mackerel, wild asparagus and coriander
Trás-os-Montes veal, mushrooms and caramelized corn
Fig cannellone, pine nut ice cream and fresh fig
The meal actually began with an amuse bouche of —darn it, I can’t remember what it was called exactly, but basically a carbonara croquette served on a porcelain tree stump. And delightfully savory. My bouche was amusé!
Entrée.
8b) And it kept on being amusé throughout the entire meal. The mackerel — such an elegant complexity of flavors! — was served with a grainha wine with “tones of passionfruit” in it that balanced against the fish perfectly. The veal — writing this a day later, it’s indescribable, but it has stayed with me in happy memory. But nothing surpassed the fig dessert, paired with a luscious 2018 port. And I had just been telling the guide at the wine tasting about having braised figs with Stilton at an East Boston barbecue some 20 years ago . . . and then coffee and, unusually, a wooden tray of pebbles (!) was used to serve three dainty little chocolatey things. Now that’s how to do café aux gourmands!
Dessert.
8c) About the time my veal was served another party was shown in, two vivacious blond Philadelphians with a local gentleman, their guide. When told that there was a small chapel here, one of the women exclaimed “Ohhhhhhh, so you could have a wedding here!” I lifted my glass to “take wine” with the other one when I caught her blatantly staring at me, and we ended up having some very pleasant banter.
Chocolates on the rocks. No, I did not try to eat the rocks.
8d) The dining room really started to fill up, including a couple of gentlemen and a party of seven French couples at a very long table. I noted that all the ladies sat at one end and all the gentlemen at the other — not boy/girl as we so often do in the States.
9) My dream state continued as I left the dining room. Remember the beginning of the 1963 My Fair Lady, all those dreamy-eyed women descending the stairs at the opera? I couldn’t get that music out of my head.
The winery where I had just been.
10) A nice young lady drove me from the winery to the river. She is making her career in hospitality (as opposed to oenology) and knew a lot about the region. I asked her how she liked driving on all these twisty mountain roads, and she said the first six weeks were the toughest. She certainly handled the car more deftly than I would have.
11) She left me in the care of the Two Antonios, father and son, for a brief cruise of the Douro River. And really, it was almost as though I had the river to myself! First I was shown to the open canvas-roofed stern, with benches and a table. After some history and conversation with Antonio the Younger, I was invited to sit in the bow if I wished. That’s where I spent the rest of the cruise, silently taking in this beautiful region and the quiet. For awhile conversation was an effort.
This was almost the only other boat we encountered.
11a) We made it upriver to Pinhao, where we turned right to make a U-turn under a bridge and make the return journey. About ten minutes later Antonio the Elder appeared and we made conversation about the region and the hospitality industry and COVID and much else.
12) I had originally, naively, assumed they would be carrying me all the way back to Porto, but a) apparently that’s a 12-hour trip, and b) there are three dams along the way. We tied up on the other side of the river, and Marco was waiting there to bring me back to the city.
13) We did stop to watch one of the Viking cruise ships enter the locks of the next dam, but I didn’t feel the need to witness how the locks worked. In fact, I slept pretty solidly for half the trip back into Porto.
Sao Bento Station. We need more decorative tile murals.
14) So that really was an all-day excursion, and I was leaving Porto the next day. I spent my evening viewing the enormous tile murals in Sao Bento station and then had dinner at someplace near the Misericordia, Galeria do Largo. And that, too, was a beautiful little dinner of bacalhau with escabeche crème followed by Iberian pork cheeks with “Fava Beans, Blood Sausage, Confit Onion, Douro Wine Sauce,” all with just one glass of a local rosé.
15) Walking back to the hotel through the streets heavy with throngs of tourists, I felt the contrast between everywhere I had been during the day.
16) In fact, I was so blissed out I couldn’t even concentrate on packing! An early, but a happy night after an exceptional day.
Before the wines were poured.