Well kept secrets of the Portuguese people (5) - Porto of Wine
One full year of living in Porto has passed and today is the day I am going back home for holidays. I already got used to say that Portugal and Portuguese people are amazing. Amazingly relaxed. Amazingly different, but still amazingly similar to Romanians. Looking back to my own notes from few months ago, I feel now more comfortable knowing more about the city, more about how this society works and more about how much pressure I should (not) put on myself for things not going according to the plan here.
Until I will come back in autumn, I will finish my Portugal-related series with probably the most famous and touristic topic - Port wine.
I cannot help myself but start with the history of this old small Portuguese port where records of wine exports by sea and land were dating since the 14th century. After the Fernandine walls were completed (lovely story as well, but now is not the moment for it), a Wine Guard was established in Porto in order to overlook the entrance licences in the city. This was obviously a sign for intense trading and commercialization activity of wine. Jumping next to the 18th century, I find it curious that efforts were made to avoid concentrating the taverns selling wine in the heart of the city. They were considered places where fights might, and did, break out when alcohol addled the clients' brains. Therefore, in the early days, all the city taverns were located in peripheral areas inside the city walls or just outside them. One example is the riverfront area of the wall which had the greatest number of taverns, being padded by merchants & sailors - the perfect target audience. There were also fixed prices for wine, according to the quality (fine or inferior mature) and color (verde or not). So, maybe surprisingly, the most popular and valued Port wine in the old times was the white one, used for royal or religious events.
But what is the Port wine, actually? We can define it as a natural sweet wine, made from grapes grown in the Demarcated Region of the Douro whose quality deserve the privilege of the beneficio. The fermentation is halted two or three days after it began by adding wine spirit or aguardente in the right proportion and with an alcoholic content of little more than 75%. The basic colours are red and white. The white (Branco) one is usually young with different sugar contents. The Ruby is a dark red wine bottled still young to keep the intense colour and arome. The Tawny is a red wine aged in cask for some years before being bottled. There are also special categories of Port wine like vintage (wines from a single good year, bottled 2 years after the harvest and aged in the bottle), LBV (Late Bottled Vintage) is a wine from a single year bottled after four years in a cask, reserva (wine made of white and red grapes of premium quality, bottled after 7 years in a cask), colheita (wine from a single harvest that aged in wood for 7 years).
Of course, the Port wine made today is not the same as Port wine made in the 18th century.
Wine itself is an icon of Porto, the city being influenced by it in its organisation, economic profile, urban development, architecture and heritage. Even though Port Wine is the main pride of Portugal, my favourite wine is Vinho Verde about whom I'll grumble, mumble, rumble with a different occasion.