TNs: Trip to the Algarve with vinous bonuses

Spent a week in sunny Algarve with friends, going to several beaches from Lagos to Tavira. Everything was wonderfully quiet with the relative lack of foreign tourists, ans in the midst of beers and unremarkable Vinho Verde, there were two wines in this trip that did stand out.

Taboadella is an old Dão estate recently purchased by Luisa Amorim, heiress of the billionaire Amorim cork empire, who also owns Quinta Nova in Douro. Her resident oenologist, my friend Jorge Alves, continues to perform her bidding at this new project, and we bought three bottles of Taboadella’s white Villae - their entry level series - to open at dinner throughout the week. I was encouraged by the wonderful, concentrated yet fresh reds (some varietals, some blends) from the 2018 vintage I had tasted in the past months, and found that this wine is drinking great - open and generous, smack full of citrus, zippy white plums and freshly cut grass, with terrific persistence. Almost too big for an outdoor hot summer night patio light dinner, which was the context in which we opened this, but still really enjoyable.

On my way back north with a friend on the wheel, we took an impulse decision and stopped for lunch at Tia Alice restaurant in Fátima - the real sanctuary of Fátima, as I like to put it (in a very blasphemous and agnostic way). We ordered their veal, a dish I normally associate with cafeterias and cheap restaurants but which they consistently carry into the stratosphere of softly textured savoriness, and Nuno Clemente, the very generous owner who double bills as sommelier, offered us a bottle of São Domingos Garrafeira 1990, from a series of cases he’s recently bought.

I was instantly struck by how pristine the bottle showed: it didn’t look well preserved as much as it looked new. I may be a chump, but I would have absolutely been fooled if they had exchanged the 1990 on the label for a vintage of the past decade, so my endless gratitude goes out for whoever cellared this for the past 30 years. The wine showed just as well: very reticent at first, it gradually opened up throughout the meal with notes of wet earth, smoking pipe, shitake mushrooms, pine and toffee. The acidity was sappy yet never overwhelming, and globally the mouthfeel was the portrait of its elegant, translucid color and 12% ABV (oh, those were the days). If the Caves São João reds from the same period are brutish and tense, this wine was all feminine poise. I have no idea where this might be going from here, but it’s at a splendid state of maturity with zero signs of going downhill.

As a bonus, and for no other reason than to prove that I’ve been to Paradise, I would like to add a picture of the Cacela Velha beach, right after I had spent the afternoon getting sunburnt there and before I had a mid afternoon light meal by the old Cacela wall with some phenomenal oysters - far better than any I’ve had in the Porto region.
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Lucky you! I was able to visit the Algarve a few years ago and it was wonderful. Albufeira, with some driving around. Drove down from Lisbon where I was fortunate enough to spend a week. Once all this Covid stuff calms down, I want to return. Great food and wine everywhere at reasonable cost.

This does bring back memories - many years ago, on my first trip to Portugal, we stayed at the Carvoeiro Clube - gorgeous location. I can recall having my first taste of grilled sardines in a local bar in Portimao, and I also remember finding a cache of five bottles of a 1978 Garrafeira at a little wine store. Can no longer recall the producer, but we bought and gratefully consumed them all during our stay [cheers.gif] .

The Bairrada is so famous for its ‘leitão’ (suckling pig) that in the town of Mealhada you can find a restaurant serving the dish literally every other door. However, there is probably no better one than Mugasa, in Sangalhos, where I joined Caves São Domingo’s Alexandrino Amorim (Alex for friends) for lunch today, after commenting with him what a wonderful 1990 Dão Garrafeira I had had on my way back from the Algarve. He stepped up the game and brought a singing 1983 - without the stuffing and signs of future longevity that the 1990 had, but equally elegant and distinctly nutty, with zero signs of volatile acidity. A very modest wine that, according to Alex, had a 12 month elevage in a cement vat that might not pass regulatory inspection nowadays. Having offered to buy 4 of the 9 magnums he has left of this wine, he volunteered to gift them, as the wine - given current consumer trends and the value of domestic, aged still wines - is practically worthless. A humbling thought when one thinks of other wine regions, and much apropos as we discussed Dirk Niepoort’s Bairrada wines, Alex’s experiences at Bordeaux wine fairs and the future of the Caves São João.
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I actually love Bairrada’s espumante with leitao. The acidity cuts through the richness.
What is the future of Caves Sao Joao? I hope they keep selling their older wines.

I agree with you, although the pretext of this lunch was the wine we had. I think it just boils down to the fact that espumante is easy to pair with food, generally speaking - and that may be its greatest credit, since most espumante is mediocre when compared to champagne, and in that sense it is outdone only by Portugal’s atrocious late harvest whites. Even Vértice and Murganheira’s best efforts have felt underwhelming to me (particularly the latter).

Caves São João were inches away from being purchased by Sogrape before the lockdowns. I don’t know what would happen to their old wines, if anything, but it could do wonders for their current state of affairs. Quinta do Poço do Lobo, for instance, has great tourism potential. My pessimistic instinct makes me believe that a Sogrape purchase would stimulate their production and sales and thus drive the prices of those back vintages way up. Given their quality, those wines are so cheap right now that I feel offended as a consumer, the same way I feel when it comes to very expensive wines. 1984 white Frei João is one of the wines of my life.