To save time in the morning we took the breakfast buffet at our hotel in Porto. It was reasonably good with enough variety, I thought, but a little pricey. We loaded up the car and headed out.
The Douro Valley is a steep river valley with winding roads. Our first scheduled wine tour was in Valdigem, near Peso da Régua. You can take a scenic route along the river to get there, but it took some manipulation to get the map directions to even plot it, as an unfavorable path that would take at least 3 hours. Instead, we followed the default map directions for the faster, but still scenic, northern route since we were running a little late.
Much of our drive up the Douro Valley looked like this: narrow, winding roads, lots of rockery, and views of the river and terraced vineyards.
Quinta de Marrocos
We had rented the car and made our own tasting appointments to get some "authentic" experiences, and we succeeded. Our 1pm appointment at Quinta de Marrocos, one of the oldest wineries in the Douro region. We were met by the wine maker himself, César, who has been making wines there since 1979 on the multi-generational estate. He saw my husband's Seahawks cap, and told us that Rick Steves had visited him some 30 years ago, as the first quinta in Portugal to review (for those not from the Pacific Northwest, the travel writer Rick Steves is a local celebrity). He knew of Steves's health issues and wished him well. Then he informed us that it was time for a rest and asked us to come back in a couple hours.
Courtyard of Quinta de Marrocos.
Castas e Pratos
Luckily we were accepted early for our lunch reservation at Castas y Pratos. This restaurant and wine shop is in a long building with an open beam ceiling, next to the rail line in the town of Peso da Régua. There are other wine shops and tasting rooms there, so you probably could make a day of it right here.
Trains run the Douro Valley up to Pocinho, so you could make a day trip from Porto. The Douro has multiple dams with locks, so you can also take a Viking cruise all the way up to Vega de Terrón from where the river forms a border with Spain up to Salto de Castro. On the Spanish side, it is called Ribera del Duero.
Again, I have already forgotten what we ate at Castas y Pratos (I really need to keep notes but it ruins the moment to do so). I think my husband had black pork with mushrooms and truffle and I'm pretty sure I had the almond crusted cod. In any case, it was delicious and the service was also terrific and friendly. Highly recommended.
If you are a foodie traveling in Europe, check the Michelin Guide before you go. You will find amazing restaurants in the smallest of towns, and many of these will be very affordable, especially in comparison to US restaurants. You might notice most of my meal descriptions use words like delicious, fantastic, incredible, etc. The Michelin Guide is how we found a lot of these places. Some are even fairly casual, but you will probably want to make reservations at any of them.
Quinta de Marrocos (for real this time)
After lunch we headed back to Quinta de Marrocos for our tour and tasting. César hosted us in his living room — it's unclear if that is truly his current living space or only an historical one. We were surrounded by old photos of the vineyards and his family. The site itself pre-dates the winery, as it was originally a Franciscan monastery that became a farm and a refuge for people being pushed out of Régua on the north of the river.
César walked around the property to see the steep terraced hillsides and stone stairways, where even today all the labor is manual. He showed us through the rooms where the grapes are received and processed. As I said, the whole of the property is on steep hillsides, so the receiving rooms are built into the lower levels of the building and they utilize gravity to move the grapes and the juice. The crush is still done by foot, but of course all this work was completed before our October visit.
Crushing grapes by foot is still done. As César said, it looks nothing like when Lucy does it; it's quite slow and orderly, four people arm in arm, stepping gently with a stirring technique with their feet. The point is to release the juice without crushing the bitter seeds. I understand they do this in 4 hour shifts.
We passed through the wooden and ceramic tanks and on to the tasting room. We sampled table wines and ports. There is a limit on the amount of port that can be produced each season, and the excess wines were used for making brandy to fortify the ports. However, today, less expensive brandies are being imported and many Portuguese port makers have also started producing table wines, and many of these are quite good. We came away with a few bottles, earmarking the Colheita vintage 2000 port for home — yes, we toted it in our luggage over the rest of our travels and today it is in our "cellar" (a walk-in closet in the basement) awaiting a special occasion to share it with friends.
Quinta do Vallado
Our next tasting was across the river at Quinta do Vallado. We were a bit late due to our scheduling change and we had to join the group tour in progress. This winery is another of the oldest in the region but felt quite modern and commercial compared to Marrocos. It was a bigger operation and we saw many stainless steel tanks and mechanical stirrers as well as new and old barrels. We picked up a bottle here as well, to carry with us on our travels.
Casks at Quinta do Vallado.
From there, we continued upriver some ways to our lodging, the Vila Gale Douro Vineyards. This place looks a lot nicer on the website than it turned out to be. In some ways it was awesome, and in others pretty terrible. We arrived in rainy darkness, to climb a switch-backing drive (only nearly ended in the actual vineyard once) to find the main entry building and get checked in.
The lodgings are in smaller buildings up and down the hillside, so we followed the instructions to where we were to park. Now the fun: hauling the luggage down 2 flights of wet, slate stairs to the room. The room itself was pretty nice, with a big, comfy bed and plenty of space for luggage. But we also found (the next night) a couple big bugs which we determined to be house centipedes, basically harmless and somewhat beneficial but not anything you want to find in your bed!
Pool and sky at Vila Gale.
The website showed several restaurants but only the bar was open. There was no one else there so we sat in front of what we thought was a soccer match but was actually some show about the players (sure, that's beyond the hotel's control). We had some mediocre appetizers and a glass of their own Val Moreira wine, which was decent.
