Europe 25: Porto, Day 3

Our next day in Porto started with a lovely morning at the apartment. Porto was a very nice place that way.

But we had plans! Or, at least goals! Because you can’t make all that effort to go somewhere and then stay in your apartment all day – you could do that at home with a lot less fuss, after all – nor can you go to Porto and not have the port wine, and by port wine I mean not just a glass here and there, but an actual tasting or two. And when you combine these things, that meant that we had to get out and do some serious port exploration. This is where we really missed our friends, since Josh is a Port Wine Guy and is both knowledgeable and excited about the stuff and it would have been a lot of fun to do this with him – that kind of interest is contagious – but we did our best on our own and we had a lovely time doing so.

If you’re really going to sample the port wine when you’re in Porto you probably want to go to Gaia, across the Dom Luis I bridge, because that’s where all of the big port wine producers and most of the smaller ones have their cellars. You can find some in Porto itself, and if port wine is really your thing you can take a train all the way out into the Duoro Valley where the vineyards are (about a two or three hour ride), but for casual fans like us whose basic position is “Sure! I like port!” Gaia is the place to be.

We made our way downhill toward the Cathedral along our now preferred route, turned left, and found our way back to the Dom Luis I bridge. Casa Guitarra, where we saw the Fado concert, is one of the awnings on the right in that first photo. We crossed into Gaia on the upper level of the bridge, dodging the metro trains and generally enjoying the scenery no end.

Once on the Gaia side of the bridge our next task was to get down to the river level where the port cellars are, and that – as the photos would indicate – was significantly further down the hill than the upper level of the bridge. It’s a long, long way down and getting from Point A to Point B involves taking a lot of staircases rather than just walking down the roads, but there were quite a number of people making this trek with us so we knew where to go by following the flow of people, and eventually we made it to the river.

We thought we had a 1pm appointment at the Quevedo cellar and since we arrived at river level a fair bit before that we wandered along the shoreline for a while. It’s a lovely and scenic place where you can watch the boats go by and enjoy seeing Porto from a different and much lower angle.

The thing about the river level of both Gaia and Porto is that this is the altitude where the tourists really hang out. When you’re in the other more vertically-enhanced parts of those towns there is an interesting mix of tourists and locals, weighted in one direction or the other depending on where you are and what’s around you, and you can head over to join whichever group seems to be doing the most interesting thing. But the river levels are designed for tourists, so you have to accept that and work with it.

There’s a lot there for the tourists, it has to be said. For one thing, there’s a cable car if you want to try that, and we thought about doing that but in the end we never did. It would have meant a lot of backtracking from where we were when we decided it was time to go back to the Porto side of the river, and there were better alternatives in front of us.

There are also food options, as befits any tourist-oriented location. We found a place that sold pasteis de nata – not as good as the regular places in town that are at least somewhat more local-centric, but still worth eating because hey, they’re pasteis de nata and you can’t really go wrong that way. There was also a market with all sorts of food stalls where you could go from place to place to get lunch, and we returned there when it was time to do that since everything else was at least a 2km walk away. They kind of have that market cornered. And there was a little craft market where you could get all sorts of Tourist Gear, including hats made of cork. They also sell shoes and wallets made of cork if you look for them. A lot of wineries are moving to screw-top bottles now, since they are better at preserving the wine than the traditional cork stoppers, so there’s a lot of excess cork production that the Portuguese are trying to figure out what to do with. Why not a hat?

If you get nothing else out of the past few paragraphs, it should be obvious that the Gaia riverfront is not the most “authentic” location in Portugal, but you know what? It was lovely and fun, and that’s all we asked it to be. Sometimes you just have to enjoy what's in front of you, after all. And it was close to the port cellars, which was our reason for being there in the first place.

When 1pm rolled around we presented ourselves to the good folks at Quevedo and discovered that we had no actual appointment with them. We never did figure out whether we’d just noted them in the guide and decided on our own to go there at 1pm or whether we had an appointment somewhere else that we’d forgotten about, but the Quevedo people were very friendly and invited us to sit down for a port tasting right then and there, and since that was what we had wanted to do in the first place we happily agreed. It has to be said that they took very good care of us and served us some very nice ports, and if you find yourself in Gaia I can happily recommend a visit to the Quevedo cellar.

We went with the four-port tasting and they brought out the required number of varieties arranged in order of robustness, explaining what each one was and how it was different from the others.

At the light end you had what they called a rosé port, a fairly new variety which the Quevedo guy explained was their attempt to capture a younger market with a more delicate port. It was good, but I have to confess as a personal preference that I don’t really do delicate when it comes to flavors – I generally prefer things that know what they’re supposed to taste like and don’t make me guess – and I looked forward to the next ones. Those started with a white (Blanco) port, then a red (Ruby), and then finally a Tawney. The white was a 10-year variety and quite tasty. The Ruby was a Late Bottled Vintage, which means it is aged longer than usual ports before bottling. And the tawney was a 20-year variety so it was genuinely smooth. Kim preferred the Blanco, while I liked the bite of the Ruby. They were all very good, though, and we enjoyed them thoroughly.

We also ordered some bread and olive oil to go with it because the idea of sitting there drinking wine without something to eat with it – even if we were only drinking in tasting amounts – seemed odd, and we were happy to note that unlike in Florence the bread in Gaia has salt in the recipe.

Afterward they asked us if we wanted to try anything else and as luck would have it we did! Strange how that works! Kim tried an orange wine, which was fine, and I had a Crusted Port – a variety of Ruby port – which was my absolute favorite of all the ports we had that day and which, apparently, is hard to find here in the US. I asked the folks at Total Wine about it when I got back, since their store is roughly the size of an entire medieval village and carries an astonishing variety of things I’d never considered as beverages until I saw them there, and they said they don’t stock it because there just isn’t the demand for it. Clearly I am surrounded by philistines, although as late as June 13th of this year I hadn’t heard of it either so what do I know.

The guy who led us through our tasting at Quevedo was very friendly and even recommended some restaurants for us while we were in Porto. We did try to go to one later that night, but it didn’t quite work out. Oh well. I suppose there is nothing for it but for us to go back to Porto now.

After lunch we went to Agosto’s, a much smaller, family-owned producer. Most port producers are now owned by large companies, but Agosto’s remains a family business, with production numbers to match, and we were told that you can’t actually get their port wine anywhere but Gaia. Their tasting also comes with a tour of the cellar, which you have to pay for in cash up front because they sort of expect you to buy stuff at the end and if you do you can use your credit card and they’ll give you back your cash payment as a discount. We took advantage of this by purchasing a couple of sampler packs that we took with us to Sweden and then shared around for Midsommar because Midsommar involves a fair amount of drinking and this was really good stuff.

The tour is actually fascinating. They take you through the rooms full of barrels and explain how the different varieties of port are made and how they change over time during the aging process, how many of each kind they make, how weather and conditions affect things, and so on, and then they deposit you into the tasting room where you get five varieties to try – two six-year vintages (Ruby and Blanco), two eight-year vintages (likewise), and a Late Bottled Vintage Ruby. It has to be said that all of them were somewhat better than the equivalent Quevedo ports, though the Quevedo Crusted Red remained my favorite of the day.

You could do a whole lot worse than following our footsteps from Quevedo to Agosto’s, is what I’m saying here. Lovely places and good wines, the both of them.

It was a gorgeous sunny day and not too hot, so after we got out of Agosto’s we went back to the riverfront and hung around for a bit, watching the river go by and noting the tiled church along the way.

We walked along the waterfront until we found ourselves at the base of the Dom Luis I bridge again – far too distant from the cable car to worry about heading back there – so we decided to walk across on the lower level of the bridge and see the sights from that angle.

We could have taken the steps up to our neighborhood when we got to the end, but the day was still pretty young and to be honest those were some serious steps, so instead we turned left toward the riverfront tourist area on the Porto side and this is where we discovered that the main riverfront tourist area of Porto was not really for us.

The Cais da Ribiera is set up as a long craft market along the waterfront, with alcoves into some of the buildings and plazas on the street side as well. I have no idea what they were selling because you couldn’t get close enough to find out – it was extremely crowded, to the point where you just wanted to step away from it for a while. Eventually we found a little gelato place near a guy selling hats and sat down to let it all flow around us.

One thing that might be noticeable from that second photo is that Porto in general and the Cais da Ribiera in particular were saturated with stag dos and hen dos – bachelor and bachelorette parties, in American. Mostly hen dos, and mostly British, but more than a few French and German parties as well. I counted more than half a dozen of them walking by in the twenty minutes or so that we sat there. You can pick them out pretty easily by looking for a boisterous group of about five to eight 20-something young people, usually either dressed in identical shirts or carrying some other kind of group identification and a beverage or two. For the hen dos, the bride was often wearing a headpiece (as in the photo above). The stag dos were a little less explicit about who was the future groom, but you just had to look for the guy everyone rotated around. I’m not sure why Porto is such a mecca for European wedding parties, but they were pretty much all over the city even if they were more obvious and concentrated on the Cais da Ribiera.

We wished them well from our long-married position, there in the gelato place, and then headed back up toward the Dom Luis I bridge to take the funicular back to the apartment.

Getting onto the funicular was a bit of a trick. We’ve been on such things before – there’s one in Pittsburgh, where we both lived before we got married, and there’s another in Dubuque, where we got engaged. The basic mechanics of the thing were clear to us, in other words. But for this one you have to find the entrance, which wasn’t where I thought it would be, pay for your ticket at the booth, and then get into one of the two lines – I never did figure out what the largely empty line was for. The car just goes up and back so you don’t have to wait all that long, and then you climb on with a pile of other people and up you go. There really should be more funiculars in the world, I think.

At the top we found ourselves not all that far from our apartment, and it was a pleasant walk back there.

After a nice bit of laying about we decided that it was getting close to dinner time and that we’d head over to one of the places that the Quevedos guy had recommended, but Porto is not Florence and as we were walking over we noticed that it was getting rather windy and cold, so instead we stopped at a neighborhood place near the Igreja de Santo Ildefonso with the unlikely name of the Café Tropical.

We were probably the only non-natives in the place, and this may be why the waiter found us thoroughly amusing. We decided to try a variety of Portuguese dishes and ended up with a bifana, a cachorro similar to the one we had at Gazela, some caldo verde (a green soup, as the name implies, with vegetables and a chunk of sausage), and, of course, Aperol spritz. While tasty and filling, this did not seem like enough for the waiter so he kept bringing us random bits of food, many of which were similar to empanadas and all of which were tasty. I’m not sure he even charged us for those. It was a very down to earth sort of place, and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

After a meal like that you really need to take a short walk, so we embraced the lovely Italian tradition of the paseggiata and slowly made our way back to the apartment for the night.