April 20-22
A short drive North from Lisbon landed us in Porto, a town that we were both really excited to visit. We had heard good things about the town and it’s the home of Port wine. Since we’ve been about four days since a wine tasting, it was time to get back to business.
First thing’s first – the highlight of the city for me was our dinner the first night at Cervajeria Gazela. We had seen this restaurant on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and Michael actually remembered it. So we went – it was up several hills and through some random dark streets. When we came upon it, it was a very small grill packed with people eating at the counter, eating while standing behind the counter and eating outside.
Awesome.
It has a full menu, but there is really only one thing to eat: the cachorro. It is sausage and cheese sandwich grilled to perfection with spicy sauce on top.
We also got fries and beers, but the real star was the sausage. Amazing. Plus!!! We got a seat at the counter, which was very lucky and gave us a chance to overlook all the activity.
Our first port stop was at Kopke – which is the oldest port house in Porto… you know because they wrote it on the building. It was a great first stop where we learned a bit about port and the process.
We knew very little coming into this visit and I wasn’t always the biggest fan, so it was great to get more info. For example, did you know that there is white port and rose port? Me neither. Also, most ports are either classified as Ruby or Tawny. The difference is that Ruby are fermented for only 2-3 days which allows them to keep their ruby color (hence the name) and a lot of berry flavor. Tawny ports are fermented for more days which turns more sugar into alcohol. Then they are barrel aged for extended periods of time which changes the color from ruby to a rusty color. Also that barrel exposure will mean you could taste carmel or vanilla or other flavors besides the berry flavor which is also toned down with more time in barrel. The longer tawny ports are in barrel, the lighter their color while the longer white ports are in the barrel, the darker their color.
There are also some ports that are bottled without being filtered. This allows the port to continue to age within the bottle indefinitely. These you can keep for 100+years without drinking (although I’m not sure I see the point of that). But once you open a bottle of unfiltered, you have to drink it within two or three days. For any filtered and blended bottle, apparently there really isn’t a reason to age it in the bottle, so you’ll want to drink it anytime in the first couple of years after it is bottled. Once open, a filtered bottle can be kept for three to nine months depending on other stuff.
Also – ports are fortified with brandy which stops the fermentation process before all of the sugar is turned into alcohol. This also boosts the alcohol content. About the grapes – I assumed there was a specific type of grape but there are actually over 100 different grape varietals that are used to make Port. None of the cellars made a big deal about the varietal. The important thing is that they’re grown in the Douro River valley that has a microclimate that is optimal for port grapes.
More info – if you get a 10 year tawny, that is a blended bottle of port with an average age of 10 years. Their intent is to blend so that their 10 year always tastes the same from year to year. Same with the 20 year and the 30 and 50, yada yada. Some vintages, if they are really good, will do a port specific to that year and that’s when you’ll see a specific year on the bottle. The interesting thing here is that they’ll keep that vintage in barrels until there is a demand. So a 1961 vintage that is bottled in 1980 will be much different than a 1961 that is bottled in 2018.
Our next stop was Churchill’s – no relation to Winston – that is a newer cellar with very delicious ports. Apparently since it’s younger it does things like pop up bars in London and festivals and other “hip” things that the older cellars would have a distaste for. Great ports – definitely some of our favorites.
Our next tasting was Calem which was a great tour of their cellar plus Michael booked us for the port and chocolate tasting. Bonus! Out of the thirty or so people on the tour only one other couple did the chocolate tasting with us – a couple from Texas: Bill and Mary Beth. They were celebrating their 39th wedding anniversary on Saturday. We had a great time getting to know them and went on to do a second tasting and then dinner with them.
The highlight of dinner? Three things – round two of the goose barnacles. For the crew that hung out with us in San Sebastián… round one was much better.
Still a highlight, but they just didn’t have the right pizazz.
Highlight two – Mary Beth and I shared the salt cod. It was salt baked. So it came out in flames that they scooped off with the extra salt. What!? Also in this picture you can see the tomahawk steak that Michael and Bill shared.
The final highlight is that the wedding anniversary got the entire table free champagne and chocolate cake. Boom!
Our last day in Porto was quiet time after so much commotion the day before. I cranked out a few blog posts, Michael cooked dinner and we watched movies. Just the type of quiet day you need every once in a while.
