I Just Flew Back From Portugal and Boy Are My Arms Tired
So thank god I brought back some wine! Plus a Movie at the end!
For those who aren’t aware, my primary day job is that of a sales rep for a Portuguese wine distributor for the Los Angeles area. Yes, purely Portuguese - we don’t even include Spain; none of this “Iberian penninsula” gar-ba-bage.
I’ve been hawking these wines for the past 9 months and finally got to take a trip to Portugal itself, and meet the people behind the wines and see the vineyards / wineries, all so I could collect first hand knowledge vs. prattling off tech sheet data and overly branded bios. The trip and room/board was covered by the company, and yes, that’s a big ol’ fatty fat perk of this job.
The trip wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Almost literally zero sunshine, in fact: the country had just sustained two weeks of excessive rainfall that caused mudslides and downed trees, the aftermath of which was litered across the country as we traveled it, with many roads closed or partially closed for repairs. Luckily, it barely rained the week we were there, though the sun hardly peeked past the unbroken sheet of grey that was the sky.
Our first half-day in Porto was gloriously sun-soaked, and that was about it.
Worse, our whole team got food poisoning at the end of Day 2. We awoke in the wee hours of Day 3 and folks, I haven’t exeperienced a misery like this in years and years. It’s one of those ordeals that has you say out loud “I just want to die” and you mostly mean it.
BUT…the people were beyond lovely. While we all suffered, the place we stayed allowed us to recover without charging us more, helped us get Immodium and anti-vomit meds so we could handle the 1.5 hour drive we needed to undertake to get to our next location, and the wineries bent over backwards to accomodate our shifted schedule.
We got scammed in Lisbon with our Air BnB accomodation and a lone waitress at a Pizza parlor stayed open late while our boss had to argue a refund, go through good faith attempts with the scammers (she even let us borrow her phone when they wouldn’t pick up our boss’ number anymore - and it worked! And then our boss had to wander back to the prooperty down the street with her phone and she was like “it’s no worry, it’s fine.” And then she gave us lots of booze and pizza to pass the time.)
So that’s the last I’ll say about the trials, because the country is beautiful - even without the sun - and the people even moreso.
DAY 1: PORTO
After an 11 hour flight to Lisbon with a quick connecting flight, we spent our first half day in the city of Porto, the birthplace of Port, the fortified dessert wine.
It was a rare sunshine-filled day, which made the city look absolutely beautiful. A very old city, founded in the 1100’s, the major Port houses line the river here, where street performances and touristy overpriced food and beverages are sold.
I did try a Porto Tonico (dry white port and tonic water) cocktail, came with a lemon wedge over ice and yikes was it good! Drinkable on a warm day like a non-alcoholic beverage would be. So dangerous! And now I knwo what dry white port is good for - imma be honest, I was pretty baffled by its existence until I tried it with tonic.
DAY 2: VINHO VERDE and Quinta de Lourosa
Our first winery visit was to Lourosa in Vinho Verde, with winemaker Joana de Castro. Her father founded the winery and pioneered the LYS vine training system which exposes the most number of grapes to air and sun as possible - a good thing in a region as cool and wet as the Vinho Verde!
As mentioned before, we arrived after weeks of heavy rains, so the vineyards were still very wet, though the drainage here is exceptional - they do not have probles with water in the Vinho Verde, and having your vineyards on slopes with soils that drain easy is key.
The vineyard:
The winery:
The old cement tanks:
The roots here don’t grow deep:
I wish I’d taken photos/video of the bedrooms we stayed in - all rock walls and rustic vibes. It was great, but alas, no photos.
Wine of the moment: lest you thought Vinho Verde was all crisp whites, Lourosa makes a DEEP red Brut sparkling made from Touriga Nacional. It’s one of my favorite wines that we carry. Like a less fruity, very earthy Lambrusco.
DAY 3: DOURO and Conceito
As we drove through the Douro, the land seemed to be madde up of 90% vineyards, it was wild. Both sides of the car, as far as the eyes could see. Nothing but vineyards.
The city we stayed in had some of the narrowest, windiest streets I’ve ever experiences, with cobblestone paving. My boss drove it in a manual like a champ but I would be terrified to do the same!
Here we visited Conceito and Invinicble, from winemaker Rita Ferreira.
Believe it or not, Rita planted the only hectare of Austrian Gruner Veltliner in all of Portugal. And makes an incredible champanoise style sparkling with it!
DAY 4: DAO and Casa de Mouraz / Planet Mouraz
The Dao is where we went post-food poisoning. I was the only one willing to go out with my boss while the others slept the day away. Well worth it, but I was dizzy and weak as a kitten and then the winemakers took us into this vineyard with giant granite stones, like some sort of granite Stonehenge, the vines snaking between them, and then had us goat-leap between them. To say that was pushing things for me is an understantement. I didn’t fall and die, but yikes, I sure could have.
One of the stones was drilled into (see above pic) to turn it into a lagar. They’ll cover it, then foot stomp the grapes on the rock, let the juice drain into the rock, and gravity carries it through the rock and into the winery!
The Planet Mouraz label names each of their wines after a farm animal. Here’s the real Bolinha posing with his bottle named after him. A wild orange wine with 2 month skin contact and 1 year of lees aging.
DAY 5: OBIDOS and Qunita Varzea de Pedra
Varzea de Pedra is a minial intervention group, just like Casa de Mouraz, but the vineyards couldn’t be any more different! Mouraz’s vineyards were almost wild and pagan in their spread and growth. Varzea de Pedra had some of the most orderly, well thought out and kept vineyard we saw the whole trip.
Beans were planted in-between rows trap and release nitrogen into the top soil. Other flowers were allowed to grow wild for additional biodiversity. It was beautiful.
A number of new wines will be imported soon to California from this group. They have a wine they managed to keep under $10 wholesale for the Albertsons / Costco / etc market, and an AMAZING Castelao red wine that I cannot wait to taste around town.
DAY 6: ALENTEJO and Quinta do Mouro and Bojador (Rocim)
The Alentejo is the southern-most part of Portugal, a less talked about region as it’s hotter, flatter, poorer, though it makes up nearly one third of Portugal’s total landmass!
We had two exceptional wineries to visit here, the first being one of our most important - Quinta do Mouro, a wine we’ve placed in Michelin starred restaurants. The winery is considered one of the very best of the Alentejo region.
The founder won the property in a poker game back in the 1970’s! Or rather, he wone the money to purchase the property and land. Back then, it was the same price as a Lamborghini, so he had to choose between buying either-or. He chose the land.
The next stop was the ROCIM winery. Many of you reading this will be familiar with Rocim - they’re seemingly everywhere in America these days. But we don’t represet Rocim itself. Insetad, we rep their head winemaker’s personal passion project - BOJADOR.
DAY 7: LISBOA (aka Lisbon)
Our final day was a free day - at last! We got to wander the city of Lisbon. It was pretty AF.
And th-th-th-that’s all about my trip to Portugal, folks! Now I need to sleeeeeep.
BONUS PORTUGUESE WINE AND MOVIE PAIRING
To celebrate my first trip to the country, I decided I had to watch my first true blue Portuguese movie! (And not just Portuguese language aka Brazilian.)
And what better selection than the 1942 debut feature film of the godfather of modern Portuguese filmmaking, Manoel de Oliveira.
Aniki-Bobo (named after a counting child’s nursery rhyme, like “eeny meeny minie moe”) was largely ignored upon release, and Oliveira did not make another feature for 20+ years! But when he returned, he would continue making films until he was 106 years old in 2014 (!!), becoming the oldest still-active filmmaker in history.
Aniki-Bobo was made during the authoritarian regime of a different de Oliveira, António de Oliveira Salazar. As such, filmmakers were limited in what they were allowed to explore and how. Manoel wanted to make a love letter to his home city of Porto, and selected a cast of non-professional cast and crew, showcasing the battle between freedom and kow-towing to authority in the shape of natural childhood rebellion.
Here, the kids are undergoing weirdly adult dilemmas - a love triangle, poverty, disenfranchisement, tests of loyalty, doubt, and consequences for both decisions made and circumstances outside one’s control. The kids are forced to evolve fast, mature emotionally, while the adults are portrayed as largely petulant and childlike, less coherent, eloquent, and more quick to temper than any of the children.
There’s a critical moment at the end of Act 2 that is wonderfully profound: a tragedy that occurs by happenstance, yet one of the kids was *about* to perhaps cause it anyway. The kid gets the blame, even though technically he didn’t do it, though we all saw he might have done it if given a second or two more to accomplish it. Is there blame for that? Should there be any guilt? It wouldn’t have been quite intentional on the kid’s part, not the tragedy itself, but likely they would have caused it.
These are the kind of thought provoking situations the movie explores while ostensibly being a rambunctious lark about children in Porto, under the shadow of WWII. From what I understand, the style here is very different than what Manoel would become when he returned to feature films 20 years later. He’s generally a minimalist, though Aniki-Bobo is more maximalist, frenetic and fueled, the camera darting with the same energy the children display.
All in all an breezy watch but with deeper content than it seems. Ostensibly a Little Rascals caper, de Oliveira had a lot he wanted to say and do with this film, and it would probably award multiple viewings in that context. Definitely recommended. Can’t wait to see more from Oliveira and Portugal in general.
Pair with…
BEIRAO, baby! (see the last photo under Lisbon in this post) The sweet, complex, utterly scrumtuous Portuguese liquor is perfect for this high energy, youthful, sweet, endearing romp.
That all sounds... eventful! I'm glad the wines made up for the travel trials!
Title nearly made me spit out my morning coffee.