Outside's Go Magazine

Portuguese Wine Search

IBERIAN REDLINE

Two intrepid oenophiles blast through Europe's new vine country by motorbike to find out if Portuguese vino tinto is ready for the world palate. One week and 100 bottles later, the inescapable answer: Damn straight!

By Eric Hansen
Photographs by Rob Howard

Three days and 29 bottles of wine after arriving in Portugal, my buddy Tim and I are seated at a large round table with crisp linen in the far corner of the Refúgio da Vila hotel-restaurant in the town of Portel. The waiters have left for the night, the rest of the patrons have gone to bed, and dozens of crystal glasses sit in front of us all half-full of wine. Tim and I are taking a much-needed break from our rigorous tour of wineries — by tasting wine.

Travel Notes

Portugal Wine Country

ACCESS
>Fly TAP Portugal airlines (flytap.com) from New York City directly to Lisbon. Round-trip fares from $800.

LODGING
>Casa do Terreiro do Poço is a magnificent hotel in Borba (a town with white ...

I gargle a slurp. "Great date, awkward lover," I say.

Tim swirls his glass, smells, drinks. "Fun party, too bad the stereo broke," he replies.

I say, "Beautiful boat, small sails."

Tim says, "Porch-pounder."

"I now understand why some people worry that heaven is boring."

"Some day, when I'm old and the head of a wonderful family and I've done all I wanted to do, I still won't like this wine."

We laugh and grab fresh stemware.

We're playing Wine Snob for fun because we haven't yet had a chance to really break the neck off any bottles. Most everything we've tasted in the wineries surrounding the south-central Portuguese town of Évora has been pretty damn good. And the between times haven't been bad either. Astride 1200cc Buell Ulysses motorcycles, we've hossed from one winery to another, ripping along country roads in the dusty, rolling hills southeast of Lisbon, visiting two producers a day, sampling every vintage in the cellars, and jotting mostly exuberant notes about delicate aromas and soft tannins. If we're not pausing, we'll spit and get back on the bikes, maybe detour down a dirt road to a castle. If we're staying awhile, we'll raise full glasses of the finest reserva over a meal with the winemaker.

Our "job," as the IRS will understand it, is to track down the next great bottle of red. Friends and colleagues doubt we'll find it in Portugal — we know better. After all, oenophiles from The New York Times and the World Atlas of Wine have begun pegging Portugal as heir apparent to Australia and Argentina, South Africa and Chile, even Spain.

Eric and Tim in Borba

The Portuguese have been producing table wines since Roman times (on average, Portuguese consume six times as much wine as Americans), but historically only their port has been sophisticated enough for export. Entrance into the European Union changed that. Suddenly family-owned quintas could easily trade with and receive investments from the rest of the continent, and many producers — led by the wealthy port houses — promptly updated their facilities with modern techniques and sophisticated machinery. Most, however, resisted the temptation to replant with superstar varietals like cabernet and merlot, instead continuing to grow native grapes like Trincadeira and Moreto. As a result, wineries across the country, and especially those in this little-known Alentejo province, are now producing world-class wines with unique character — overall, the bright red nose and jammy belly you'd expect from one of the hottest places in Europe.

This is why Tim, a 31-year-old sommelier and boutique-wine importer from Colorado, has come to Portugal for the second time in the last seven months. His five-year-old company, VinoTerra Importers, specializes in wines that show all of the polish of a Haut-Brion but also speak of the people and land from which they came. Normally he's very serious about the task: He spent months tramping around northeast Italy, for example, before he found one of his trademark wines, Emilio Bulfon, made from a grape thought to have been extinct but discovered in an overgrown vineyard in the countryside.

Tonight, however, comfortably slouched at the Refúgio da Vila, we're taking a break from our quest — or at least its earnestness. We loop back to taste previous bottles now opening up and finally, carefully, decant what should be the best, a Mouchao 2001.

"It's corked," Tim laments. All I can see of him over the wall of glasses is his spiky brown hair. "What's the most expensive bottle of wine you've had?" I ask.

"Petrus, 1998" he replies. "Four thousand, two hundred dollars."

"What did it taste like?" I ask.

"Dog food," he says with a smile.

The trip began with a wheelie. I rolled back on the throttle, dumped the clutch, and reared into traffic on a seaside road at the south edge of Lisbon. Seconds later, we accelerated to Autostrada speeds across the gaping Vasco da Gama Bridge and the city quickly disappeared. An hour later, Alentejo presented itself in a blurry montage of lonely gas pumps, old ladies carrying groceries on the shoulder of the road, and a caravan of honest-to-God Gypsies in horse-drawn wagons.

Plowed fields alternated with thickets of mushrooming cork trees, their trunks numbered one to nine depending on how many years ago they were harvested. In each tiny town, the sound of our Ulysseses — a baritone grumbling unfamiliar in a region of put-put scooters — caused the old men smoking in the squares to turn their heads in unison and watch us pass. A popular joke about Alentejo: Why does a farmer from Alentejo keep a chair by his bed? So he can rest after rising.

Our first appointment took us to Monte da Comenda Grande, a 100-year-old family farm that spans the horizon in Arraiolos, 85 miles east of Lisbon, just northwest of Évora. Nuno, a 35-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and the third generation to manage Comenda Grande, gave us a tour of the winery, a low, L-shaped building with a red-tile roof, blue-trimmed shutters, and perfectly tended lemon trees dotting the gravel drive. Despite the quaint facade, the facility, like all the wineries we would visit, was immaculate and modern inside with a temperature-controlled storage room, a white-wine chiller, and a central computer.

At lunch, Nuno led us past antique hammered-copper pots hanging over sooty fireplaces and ceramic cauldrons once used to make wine to a long, rough-hewn dining table. Two aging maids scurried out of the kitchen wearing white aprons embroidered with the family crest and carrying sausage and sheep's cheese produced on the farm.

"We say grace," declared Nuno's stately mother, Maria de Lourdes de Noronha Lopes. "Thank you for the meal, thank you for a safe trip from the U.S..."

The highlight of the meal was a simple country stew of eggs, potato, tomato, brown beans, and green pepper. A local herb that grows wild near streams lent a tangy flavor, like mint and oregano.

And then the wines, five of them uncorked in the middle of the table. Nuno poured the table wine first, and we gradually progressed to the reserva. They were simple and honest, what you would expect from vines that are four years old and growing in blazing sunshine.

The winery's story might be there, but Tim and I agreed that the wine wasn't quite. That evening, we toured another vineyard down the road and the next day two others up north that were solid but not astounding. Even so, with the Ulysseses always waiting, we never felt even a twinge of disappointment. The empty, two-lane roads between wineries wound and dipped through ranches and mowed fields with huge boulders clustered around flat-topped trees in the middle of brown meadows. We'd juice it over a rise to feel our stomachs float, then careen into windy creekbeds and round out the tires. Twenty minutes of whoop-and-holler riding would pass before we'd see another car. Dangerous-corner signs signaled fun ahead.

After one particularly fortuitous wrong turn, which led us miles down a deserted, full-throttle dirt road, we eventually stopped. Sunset. Only the twitters of field birds. Tim said, "I don't know if I can ever do another one of these trips without a motorcycle," and then gunned it for the horizon.

Nonetheless, midway through the trip, after our late night at the Refúgio da Vila and a fruity afternoon at the regional tasting room, just three days remain and we haven't found a single import-worthy wine. We agree to employ Tim's favorite method: Go to a famous restaurant and sample till the credit card maxes out.

We head for Fialho, a tavern deep in the labyrinthine alleys of the walled city of Évora, where the decor of wooden farm tools and hand-crafted plates hints at an exceptional menu of slow food. We settle into six different appetizers, including roasted lamb and a pork-and-clam stew, then get after what we're really here for — the sommelier. We start with his favorite two bottles and go from there until midway through lunch, when we've found a couple great wines that weren't on our itinerary. We ask the sommelier to phone the winemakers to set up appointments on our behalf; it turns out he can do one step better.

Around the corner, from the bar, steps a tall lanky man, well over six feet, with a crazy shock of black hair, droopy cheeks, a pointy chin, deep oblong bags under his eyes, and a gargantuan schnoz.

"What do you think of the wine?" he asks, pointing at our 2003 Quinta do Mouro.

Before we can answer, he grabs Tim's glass and sticks his tremendous nose deep inside. His beak is huge, almost Gallic, and distorted in the parabolic curve of the glass it grows even bigger, oblate. He inhales so deeply I think my ears will pop.

He waits for us to say something, but we're too stunned. A Portuguese Keith Richards just sniffed Tim's wine. Seeing that we are apparently deaf and mute, he moves to return to the drink he's sharing with three attractive ladies.

"This is Miguel, the winemaker," explains the sommelier, grabbing him by the elbow.

Miguel agrees to show us where he makes his wine. "You can come to my house," he says. "It is not a winery."

Quinta do Mouro, a crumbling whitewashed estate 25 miles northeast of Évora, is surrounded by a humble 22 hectares of vineyards. Untended fields and a highway hem the property in on one side; a slapdash housing project borders on the other. The pastoral beauty of Comenda Grande couldn't be farther away.

Miguel walks us through a door off the driveway and into the basement of the house, waves absently at the handful of stainless-steel fermenting vats, and takes us up rickety stairs to a musty living room. The tour is over. He will give us a 20-minute tasting with his son, Luis. "So we're looking for something not so fruity," I say.

"Pbbbst!" Of course we don't want something fruity. "Everybody wants strawberries and chocolate and coffee. I am a winemaker, not an ice-cream producer!"

As soon as I sip the first bottle, a Touriga Nacional, I'm convinced we have a winner. It has great depth and a core of dark fruit. You can almost detect young port. And they just keep getting better from there, all the way up to the Quinta do Mouro, which is plush, warm, and, despite Miguel's ice-cream outburst, full of fresh berries.

The story behind the wine, gathered in fragments, is damn near as good. At 27 years old, Miguel was starting his dentistry practice and had saved enough money to buy either a Porsche Carrera or this estate (which was in the countryside then). He bought the land and bumbled along as a hobbyist until one day when winemaker Paolo Lourenço arrived in his office for a cleaning. "I took out every tooth so he would have to come talk to me," Miguel jokes.

The two struck up a mentoring friendship, lunching every week to taste wines. During this time, Miguel contracted hepatitis A. He lost 100 pounds. He could hardly eat. But he didn't miss the lunches. Instead of drinking the wines, he'd simply insert his phenomenal sniffer into the glasses and smell for the concentrated blueberry, the black currant of Aragones, the floral aromas of Periquita. At the end of the year, Lourenço placed five glasses of Portuguese red in front of Miguel and asked him to identify the estate, the vintage, and the grapes. Miguel nailed them all.

Since then, Miguel has produced small quantities of wine with a madman's disregard for common sense. One of the few palates he trusts besides his own is that of an old friend who always waits a day before offering a critique, saying, "Wine must be good in the mouth and the stomach." Despite the cost of cellaring wines, Miguel refuses to introduce his to market before aging them three and a half years.

"This wine," he says, holding up a glass of his Quinta do Mouro 2002 Gold Label. "I almost poured it all down the drain a couple months ago."

"He's compulsive," his son interjects.

"The only reason I didn't is because there weren't enough corkscrews." He holds it up to the light, as if to decide whether he should go out and buy more corkscrews now.

Three hours have passed, the sun has long set, and the tinted visors on our helmets mean it'll be a long 50 miles south to our hotel in Beja. Tim tries to steer the conversation toward business, whether Miguel would be interested in importing with VinoTerra, but before he can, Miguel insists that Tim identify his four wines blind.

Tim does.

"And what do you think?" Miguel asks.

"I'll tell you tomorrow. I have to ask my stomach."

Leaving Quinta do Mouro, Tim is confident that he and Miguel will iron out a deal, and sure enough, a couple weeks after we return to the States, they have. Even better, while Miguel was regaling me with stories, Tim was trying a bit of Alento, a wine from Miguel's son's upstart winery. Tim thinks it is the best inexpensive wine we've had — soft, juicy, and smooth, it's a modern approach with traditional grapes, Trincadeira and Aragones, and small amounts of cabernet sauvignon.

With the bottom- and top-end wines covered, we're still searching for the elusive $15 bottle, that excellent value that will turn the experimental drinker into a connoisseur. The odds aren't in our favor; only one appointment remains. We should do some more research, chat up more sommeliers. But then, Alentejo appears plagued by clean air and those poor Buells have sat neglected for almost 12 hours.

We snake our way out of Beja for an afternoon of hot laps. The beautifully smooth white pavement tracks straight and fast through endless flat fields of wheat that remind me of eastern Washington. The rpms spool up. Red roofs, white plaster buildings, the stone keep of the castle — everything recedes in our sideview mirrors except for a high-revving pack of sport bikers. They appear out of nowhere wearing full leathers, with tiny bags bungeed to the back, probably on the way to watch the upcoming MotoGP races. There's at least a half-dozen of them, and after slowing to 85 mph to check out our rugged bikes, they taunt us with a game of follow-the-leader. Team America battles the Mosquitoes. Next thing we know, we're making three-semi, four-car passes and seriously considering following their top-speed lane splits. Given our comparative reluctance to splat on the grille of an oncoming semi, I'm convinced we've lost. Tim knows better. He throws on his blinker and thrashes off down a country road. The sport bikers slow, then, seeing the gravel, motor on. Bye-bye, Euro twerps. By the time we reach Herdade da Mingorra, we're hopped up like moto punks.

Lunch at Comenda Grande with the Noronha Lopes family

Henrique Uva — owner of the winery and father of four daughters — receives us with a smile. A teddy bear of a man, with thick fingers, a full gray-brown beard, and a rounding belly, Henrique is a grape farmer through and through. Indeed, his last name is "grape." Thirty years ago, he set out growing a wide variety — Antao Vaz, Perrum, Aragones, Trincadeira, Alfrocheiro, cabernet sauvignon, and merlot — to sell to wineries. He was good at it, made a lot of money and bought more land, and grew the farm to its current size of 1,400 hectares. But a decade ago, when the price of grapes fell, he was saddled with debt. The way Henrique tells it, aside from selling the farm, he was left with no choice but to pursue winemaking. His first vintage was 2004.

Henrique walks us through his vines, all the while sharing his ideas on the right varietals, careful harvesting, why you should add just a touch of water two weeks before harvesting here, which valleys favor olive trees. He points out the rocky swaths that aren't well drained and the field that he's letting rest to protect against soil disease. He stops.

"You see here," he says, pointing to the crest of a small hill. "This is the best soil, where the earth turns from white to red. It always produces the best grapes." The soil is pink as far as the eye can see.

Later, back inside, Henrique uncorks bottles with humility to match Miguel's bravado. "I don't know if we did well," he says. "We'll see."

Two wines impress us right away, and they are both his humblest. The Terras d'Uva is Trincadeira, Aragones, cabernet sauvignon, and Castelão, not aged in wood. It's a young wine filled with fresh red fruits and accompanied by a pleasing spice, like cracked white pepper. The Monte do Valagão is a similar blend but sold as a three-liter "bag-'n'-box" with a mod label. Both have bright noses, decent depth, and impressive structure.

"They are not fancy," Henrique says. "They have no strange smells, no special anything. It is..." Instead of finishing the sentence, he sweeps his hand across the table to point out at the vineyards.

Sold.

Travel Notes

Portugal Wine Country