Scott and CJs Travel Blog: The Douro Valley Experience!

Today we venture to the Douro Valley to visit some wineries. Our good friend Mark Joseph scheduled a wine tour for us at Quinta do Portal for 1:00pm. We have hired a tour guide and a driver to take us around and show us the sights. Well it started off a little slow since our tour guide was late and we also encountered a little more traffic then was expected but we finally arrived in the Douro around 3 hours later. Since our appointment was for 1:00 we had to skip our first appointment and head straight for Quinta do Portal. Talk about small windy roads! it took us a while to reach the winery but we made it with time to spare. We entered the tasting room and announced our arrival. The woman in the tasting room called Paulo Coutinho (the wine maker) to the tasting room to great us. In the mean time she showed us the tasting room and the upstairs conference room and the roof that was covered with grass. The winery building was new and just won an award for best architecture. The outside walls were made of cork and concrete very modern design. It’s a spectacular winery. We went back to the tasting room to meet Paulo so he could show us the winery. He took us to the main barrel room where they had all sorts of size barrels from Pipa (150 US Gallons) to massive tank like barrels. The names now escape me. We wondered through all the barrel rooms and instead of a visitor’s book Paulo allowed us to sign one of their barrels. Never signed a barrel before, real cool. He later on gave us 6 bottles of wine form that barrel to take home with us! Continuing on with the tour, the next place we visited was the wine library where they store bottles of all the wines that they have ever made. This is so they can see how the wine ages sort of a research center. Anyway The next stop was the bottling plant where they bottle the 375 ml, 750 ml and the small sample bottles. The big magnum and above are bottled by hand. Next to the processing side of the winery. This is where they bring in the grapes from the field and de-stem, crush, stomp and ferment the grapes. After the tour which took around 1 1/2 hours we headed over to the restaurant. This is a very fancy restaurant with only around 8 or 10 tables. The only table in the restaurant that was made up was ours and it was all decked out for a fancy gourmet meal. We Started with a aperitif with appetizers and a Muscatel & tonic with lemon and then a white wine. It was fantastic! Next we sat down for lunch and had an incredible meal and wine tasting. Once we were done we went back to the tasting room where we picked up our 1/2 case of wine that the wine make hand bottled for us from our barrel we signed. It was a 2011 Touriga Nacional which at the time we only knew it by the barrel number (3379). This was the most incredible wine tour / visit I ever had. We had the wine makers undivided attention for 5 straight hours! Mark thank you very much! You rock! Well to finish off the Douro valley tour we only had time to go to one more winery (Qunita Nova de Nossa Senhora). This winery was closed by the time we got there but they were kind enough to give us a tour of the winery and then do a tasting. Very good wine and port but nothing like what we went through earlier in the day. After this tasting we headed back to Porto winding through all the small winding roads over the mountains and back to Porto. What a Day!