As I continue slowly catching up on finishing the *many* review drafts of places I visited in our…read morewhirlwind tour of Portugal in January, in this case one of a whole bunch of port-focused wineries within convenient walking distance of each other, that obviously being why I chose to stay at an airbnb on this side of the bridge, so I could visit as many of them as possible.
So I'm slightly conflicted in this one, by coincidence, the first place we stopped - on one hand, I absolutely loved the small-batch craft feel of the place, with a tour the exact opposite of the museum-feeling tours you'd likely get at the tasting rooms of any of the big-name, big-production port producers we mostly see in the US (short, but you could tell you were seeing where the magic was actually happening, the guide was knowledgeable and clearly happy to answer any questions we had about port production or the different types of port (which was convenient, as while I was already very excited to taste a bunch of port, I wasn't by any means an *expert*, so it was a good primer for terminology and such). And while the tour was basically just of the one room where they age everything, it was cool to see up close and personal, and was plenty large enough to get pictures with the large aging barrels, which we... definitely should have done, in retrospect. That's on us. Their tasting room is sparse, but that's way better than feeling overly corporate, which this is, again, the very opposite of.
On the other hand, I hate to say it, but I didn't think their ports were that great? Even at the time I didn't think they were as good as some port-style California fortified wines I'd had, but especially now after having gone and had tastings at all their immediate competitors over the course of the subsequent few days, their ports were all clearly small batch and made with care, but they all still felt just a little... flabby. None were by any means bad, but they were probably still some of the least interesting ports we tried. (At least of the base ones that were included. You could add on additional tastes of the expensive ones, but I knew I'd be spending a lot this trip trying a broad range of ports at various places, and their expensive ones were... expensive).
The tour was 10 euro and included either a flight of their core ports, or chocolates that supposedly contained 20, 30 and 40 year aged port. We figured we could share a flight, so we tried both so we could have a port and chocolate pairing - the chocolates were good, but I couldn't really taste a lot of port under the ganache, let alone that one was made with 20 vs 40 year old port, so that felt like a little bit of a waste. The ports were all, as I said, decent but not amazing, at least the reasonably priced ones. That said, the 10 euro each for the tour was also refundable on a bottle purchase, so at that point we still obviously had to buy a couple bottles of the one we'd tried and liked well enough, that was affordable (the fine tawny, at an effectively 6 euro a bottle, given the refund of the tour we'd already paid for, it was a no brainer), which is why I have a small glass in front of me while finish this review, so I can confirm, yep, still just a little one-dimensional. (Though it's been quite good for cocktail-crafting.)
