Tuesday, 14 June
Today we took the train about half way into the Douro Valley. Porto is the city where (most) Port wine is matured, not where it is made. To find the centre of production, one has to travel out of the ‘cool’ Porto area where wine is kept in wood for years and into the furnace where grape vines magically convert light into sugar.
The Douro Valley is an intensely hot river valley made of steep schist (or shale) hills. The topsoil is dust. To get there, the most economic way is also one of the most dramatic: the 19th-century train line follows the north bank of the river for much of its trajectory, and one passes through smaller and smaller towns until one reaches Pinhão. Admittedly, we expected this to be a sleepy and very real village, but it was a bit of a tourist trap. Well, one street of it was. The thing with Port tourism is that the wine is fundamentally not that fashionable and there are far more popular destinations out there. It could be far worse in terms of touristy-ness – perhaps Bordeaux is. This means it is not that difficult to step out of the bubble and see glimpses of real production.
For instance, we walked a few steps out of the train station and saw the massive doors of a Dow’s building (Dow’s is one of the many Port houses owned by the Symington family). I would guess the building was late 18th or early 19th century in origin. The doors were open; one could smell the residues of grapes and see hulking great steel tanks and hear the sounds of work in the background.
Next, we semi-snuck into a vineyard which is technically free to visit but normally tries to sell you tat as a condition of entry. We simply ignored the reception and went straight up the terraces. At this point in the year, the grapes are tough little green spheres, which we did taste out of curiosity.
Each component of the grape presents problems and solutions for winemakers. The skins have the majority of the complex flavour potential, harbouring the tannic acid which produces a mouth-drying effect also found in over-brewed tea, certain kinds of apple, and very old oak-aged whisky. These grape skins were pretty robust at this point, but the tannins were overshadowed by the massive acidity of the unripe grape flesh. Eventually, the heat of the valley will allow this flesh to become very sweet indeed; in colder regions grapes will never be quite as ripe and therefore always have more acidity. The pips of the grapes were huge at this point, and very bitter. Some winemakers still use people to tread the grapes to make sure the unpleasant taste of the seeds is not released.
The vines we saw were extraordinary, particularly the older thicker ones. They look like dried rope, sloughing off in long splinters of desiccated wood. For show, the lower tiers of vines were tied with big stakes of split schist, higher up these gave way to galvanised steel or cheap pine staves. We climbed higher and higher – in the slow motion that our limbs would allow. A car passed us carrying three well-tanned contractors, their van marked ‘MAGOS Irrigation Systems’. This made a great deal of sense. After the ‘many long years of centuries and decades and eras and generations and families and oldness’ being trotted out by signs and documentaries and tour guides, it was refreshing to see some no-nonsense technology on display. The Douro is a challenging place to make anything living put up with its tough lot, and the solutions don’t necessarily have much romance about them.
Few people talk about the citrus trees of the Douro. These seem to get on with it pretty well, thank you very much, and can be found at the edges of most vineyards, decorated with perfect oranges like baubles on a Christmas tree. We pilfered two oranges. They were soft, hyper-juicy and aromatic, a marvel. We also nicked a strange, fat and squat lemon. Its smell was incredible. It’s flesh tasted of… nothing. It wasn’t even acidic. After some research Bea concluded that it must have been an unripe bergamot. She kept the aromatic skins as a trophy, though, to keep smelling them throughout the day. (This caused a bit of confusion but also an amusing conversation with a rather hyperactive tour guide on a boat later on.)
We had booked a boat tour from Pinhão to travel further east into the Douro Valley along its river. That way, both the sides of the valley and its impressive, brutal geography become panoramic. Our slot, though, was in the mid-afternoon and after our slog through the vineyard (it was getting into the high 30s centigrade), we still had time for lunch. The tourist-trap street was obviously a destination to avoid. Therefore, we found a restaurant the other side of the Douro that was renowned for good value. This was indeed the case, and the restaurant was rammed with cheery local families. We had to wait a considerable time to get a seat, but we took the time to scan through the near-illegible if short (usually a good sign) menu written in sharpie on an A4 sheet in a plastic wallet.
From research, it was clear that we should share a portion in this restaurant. Duly, we saw the plates coming out before our order was ready: they proffered heaps of food, mysterious fried fish and salad and potatoes in glorious piles. We ordered breaded hake fillets with rice and beans, a genuinely simple dish (not ‘simple’ in the Raymond Blanc sense, meaning tortuously complex). It was fresh and satisfying, and we had a baby bottle (35cl) of the surprisingly nice and floral house white wine to wash it down.
Fed and watered, we were ready to travel deeper into the Douro. Our boat was a kind of bloated barco rabelo (the name for traditional flat-bottomed boats designed to take port pipes down the river). It only had a superficial resemblance to its historic forebears, with a big decorative rudder stuck on the back for good measure. In all honesty, it is probably a good thing that this wasn’t a real barco rabelo since otherwise there would have been no canopy above us. At the time we got on the boat, the temperature briefly reached 39 degrees.
We set off at a reasonable pace, each of us listening to the audioguide provided in different languages. More technophobic passengers didn’t have headphones with them, so there was a hum of French and English audible above the noise of the boat through the water. The guide got off to a good start: explaining the different times in which each vineyard we passed was founded, or providing valuable pieces of knowledge such as that the olive groves which are on hand-terraced steps probably represent the ghosts of vineyards abandoned in the 1870s. These vineyards would have been destroyed by the Phylloxera parasite which was brought to Europe in that period, and it was simply uneconomic to replant them with anything other than olive trees.
Later on, though, the audioguide devolved a little into “On your left, there is a massive mansion/summerhouse/hotel which was bought for 1.1 squillion euros and then sold for 2.6 gajillion pounds to foreign investors who then sold it back at a loss to Vintner, Vintner & Vintner Holdings Plc Ltd GmbH.” When all research fails, the instinct of some tour operators does often seem to be to just make people drool at large numbers. Oh well! The scenery was captivating – sun-drenched but strangely bleak. The large letters proclaiming the names of vineyards from on high in old-school typefaces also lent a certain Wild West aroma to this vertiginous shale desert.
The boat tour was certainly worthwhile, and we got back on the rattly, windy, retro train fairly exhausted and headed to Porto. We decided to eat at home. I made a salad with tinned mackerel, peppers and cucumber, and a little fried finely chopped garlic. Even simpler than the lunch, but satisfying nonetheless. Soon after, blessing the air conditioning, we went to bed.
– Alfie