Monday, 13 June
This morning, we said goodbye to our sweltering B&B and made our way to the Coimbra municipal market. It opens at 6am, but many of the stalls were still closed at 8-ish when we arrived. After purchasing some deliciously funky goat cheese from an adorable little old lady who mimed everything she said to us and did our sums on a scrap of brown paper, we looked for a pastelaria to tide us over until our Flixbus. By chance, we happened upon our favourite one yet (perhaps of all time) – the pasteis were excellent, and both they and the coffees were under 1€ each.
A bus of about 1.5 hours took us to Porto, where the drive presented us with incredible sweeping views across the Douro and the city hugging its shores. The grey of the granite and steel, the bright colours of the azulejos and paint, the deep turquoise of the river with its bobbing wooden boats – central Porto looks oversaturated, like a dream.
Our Airbnb was a little flat to the north of the city. Mercifully, it had air conditioning (Porto was only a degree or two cooler than Coimbra). After getting our fill of said air and having a quick lunch of olive oil-toasted arrufada (Coimbran spiced bread) and goat cheese, we set out to explore. We had booked our first port experience for 6pm that evening, and our plan was to wind our way slowly to Villa Nova de Gaia, the port-maturing hub to the south across the river.
Porto is very different from Coimbra: most of the streets are not as steep or dense, there are far more Azulejos, and there are big buildings and a cosmopolitan feel that are less idiosyncratically Portuguese – we even saw some large government buildings that looked straight out of Edinburgh!
We meandered into the narrow and winding historic center and then walked across the Luiz I bridge built by Gustav Eiffel, a crazily vertiginous experience that surely only locals can get used to! The massive names of port brands emblazoned anove the long white warehouses on the hill left us in no doubt as to where we were headed.
On the other side, we wound our way down the hill (rather than taking the touristy albeit surreal and fun-looking cable car) to the Douro river’s edge. All port wine is made in the Douro Valley, to the east inland along the river, but it is traditionally matured in the ‘cooler’ climate in Villa Nova de Gaia (which is effectively the south side of Porto). Interestingly, the touristy bit of this area only extends along the river front – walk one street in, and you’ll be alone.
We enjoyed watching a massive truck wind its way to the back of a white-washed warehouse – a port delivery? Then, we found ourselves at Quevedo, a new-ish port house and winemaker with a minimalist, surprisingly cool (in both senses of the word) warehouse bar. We weren’t keen to visit the very big names, which we knew to have relatively rehearsed and corporate tours for what seemed like too much money, and we’d never heard of this brand.
Quevedo is very proud of its Portuguese ownership, given that so much port production is and has historically been in the hands of English families. After an extremely enthusiastic and bravado-filled introduction from one of the many young Portuguese employees, we studied the menu. We selected a very affordable flight of tawnies, young to 20 years old, and had a lot of fun tasting them and writing notes.
Quevedo, as more of a bar/shop than a tasting room, managed to strike a better balance than the other port places we visited between providing information and leaving us alone to enjoy the port. They gave us a spiel at the beginning, then let us taste and enjoy in our own time rather than standing over us. Perhaps the fact that the company’s cellars are in the Douro rather than in Porto has prevented their operation becoming yet another standard ‘cellar’ tour and guided tasting. The ports were nice, all distinctly different, and it was especially interesting to see how the 20-year-old tawny had a completely different nose from its palate. Never having tried an aged white port before this, I also really enjoyed the honeyed, raisiny 10-year-old white port our waiter brought us as a special extra sample.
Soon enough, it was time for our appointment at Caves Vasconcellos. We didn’t know what to expect of a port company owned by “Christie’s” (turns out that’s just a coincidence, it’s not the auction house), which had recent glowing reviews on Tripadvisor but until recently didn’t allow you through the door if you weren’t expressly planning on buying (and, presumably, looked rich enough to do so).
There were two old men loitering in the entrance like bouncers. They knew nothing of the booking I had made with a very friendly woman on the phone. There was no tour, we were told – their cellars were too small and exclusive, they said (one of the first of many times this phrase was to be repeated). However, we were directed upstairs, where another man with the air of an upscale hairdresser led us wordlessly upstairs. He sat us in two armchairs in a hotel lobby-like tasting room, far from the windows which had excellent views. He then poured us each a small glass of three ports – 10-year-old white, 10-year-old tawny and 20-year-old tawny, briefly noted that we should drink them in the order of pouring – and went back to the side of the room to do some paperwork.
With trepidation, we began to taste. The white port had pretty wild carrot juice notes, the younger tawny was weirdly whisky-like, and the older was like intense with notes of funk, caraway and caramel. All very interesting. We were conscious of our hesitant voices resounding in the otherwise utterly still room. Where was the hospitality, the information, the free tap water? We didn’t even know how much this was going to cost! Normally, we would have shared such a flight. I finally decided to confront our ‘host’ about the tour of the cellar we had supposedly booked. He agreed curtly that of course we could see the cellar and then over to us and finally began talking, slightly less brusk than before.
The long conversation we then had was like playing tennis with an incredibly inaccurate partner convinced of his own sporting brilliance. He kept mentioning how ‘eggsglooseeve’ his company was (making only 4,000 bottles a year and only selling from this location), how his clients and their families were clients for life, how every other port maker (he named many) was trash, especially the big ones (though he still curiously recommended Graham’s), and so on and so on. Every time I tried to engage him on a topic of interest, he interrupted me or spoke over me. We began to wonder what he was trying to sell us if he had so many amazing clients clamoring for such a tiny amount of bottles.
To his credit, even after he’d showed us the tiny cellar-warehouse of 300 and 500-liter barrels or ‘pipes’ – which was interesting in that it was the first we’d seen but also strangely clean and free of mold-smell – he did not pressure us to buy anything. That said, he was laughing all the while about how his clients come for the wine, not the cellar (nevermind that this was obviously true of us as well!). As he showed us to the door with no mention of money, we were in two very different minds: we were glad to have had this rather strange experience (and the wines were quite good), but we were most relieved that it was free.
For dinner, we sought out Porto’s famous dish, the Francesinha (‘frahnzeenya’) sandwich. Filled with meat and slathered in cheese and a tomato and beer sauce, it seemed ideally placed to soak up a port tasting or two. It was a touristy thing to do, but locals love this bastardised Croque Monsieur too, and we thought it was worth a go. Sadly, we found it too cold, too full of mystery meat and the sauce not punchy enough. A really good Francesinha would be fine, I’m sure, but it’s not an inherently brilliant thing. Moreover, our little restaurant, which looked super real but was strangely touristy nonetheless, was certainly not filled with the locals we had read it would be.
The other dish we tried was a rather nice Alheiro – a spiced and garlicky sausage filled with strangely unprocessed meat and bread, sort of like a long German dumpling. It came with rice, fries, egg and one curiously ceremonial olive. A green salad was sorely missing. We will certainly be eating in tomorrow.
– Bea