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.