Did you know there was such a thing as white port? I didn’t fortunately a visit to Porto enlightened me. Porto isn’t where port comes from but it is what most port goes through on its way to somewhere else. For centuries Porto’s wealth has relied on people getting very drunk, emptying the house of alcohol and realising that if they want to keep drinking they’re going to have to open the port.
We left Lisbon (with at least one traveller clinging weeping to the hotel door begging for more time) and piled into a bus heading north. By a fortunate coincidence our destination was also in the north. Porto rests in the valley of the Douro river just downstream from a bunch of vineyards where port is produced. Warehouses were built and fleets of small boats acquired to transport the port from vineyard to warehouse where it would be stored until the time came to ship it to Britain and other places where alcohol content is more important than taste.
Naturally being located in a river valley meant that Porto has lots of hills as most of the flat land is occupied by the river. Our hotel was part way up one of the hilly bits. Around us stretched the town of Porto with its handsome public buildings, external tiling and construction sites. Particularly the latter. Porto was being renovated when we arrived and as usual the builders had left crap all over the place. Old buildings were getting a touch up and new metro stations were being dug. As a result most of the construction site had only a vague resemblance to a town. Here and there non renovated old buildings reared proudly above the clatter and challenged you to find a way of accessing them.
Our orientation walk picked its way carefully through the scaffolding and we twisted our bodies into unusual shapes in the hope of taking a photo without a crane in it. Normally the main purpose of our orientation walks is to tire us out so we’ll go to bed when told and won’t misbehave too much but this time there was a specific objective in view. A port tasting at a boutique (and Portuguese owned) winery had been arranged. Actually the tasting was at their warehouse the winery itself being further up the Douro where they could grow grapes without them getting dug up for a metro station.
The warehouse where said tasting was to take place was down near the river so our orientation walk had a significant down aspect to it (as well as a significant “clamber over construction material element”). This meant that our return would be uphill however by that time we would be fortified with port and the port was fortified with alcohol so there should be no problem.
The port warehouses are across the river from our hotel (and indeed most of Porto) which required us to walk across a rather handsome split level bridge. We walked across the top which carries foot traffic and tram lines, the bottom carries cars and more foot traffic. The line between roads and footpaths is somewhat blurred and not just after the port tasting.
Once across the Douro we navigated increasingly narrow back alleys until we reached the port warehouse that bore our name.
“Some warehouses,” announced our guide, “provide cheese to go with the port sampling.”
“Does ours?”
“No.”
We arrived at the cheese free warehouse and after a completely unnecessary introduction to the making and history of port were finally permitted to start drinking the stuff. The ten year old white port was delicious. I’m not a huge fan of tawny ports but those who liked them said they liked them. I seriously considered ordering a a bottle or two until they handed me a discreet slip of paper with she shipping costs written on it. I decided I would just keep cutting metholated spirits with ribena.
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