day 13 :

thursday, 7 june

Immediately after breakfast, we set out to go Port tasting. Today was our only full day in Porto, so we didn't want to miss our chance to try Ports that are difficult to obtain back in the States. Eric did some homework before our trip to figure out where we should go tasting, relying on the recommendations he read in For the Love of Port, an online newsletter written by a Seattleite named Roy Hersch. By 10AM, we were seated in the tasting lounge at Ramos Pinto, with five glasses of Port before us. The selection was very nice, but nothing outstanding – a white port, and tawnies that ranged from five to twenty years in age. We were particularly interested in their 2003 Vintage Port, so since it wasn't available for tasting, we bought a bottle to age in our cellar. We've heard that this vintage is excellent, but the recommendation is to wait at least 20 years before opening the bottle. We'll have to mark that on our calendars! Next stop was Croft, where our friends had recommended we go for a tour. We enjoyed seeing the enormous cellar that houses over 200,000 bottles, and the special ageing area where they keep very old vintages, including bottles from as early as 1834.

A month before our trip, we met the winemaker and salespeople from Esporão, a winery in southern Portugal, at a wine tasting event in Seattle. Our new friend Pedro gave us suggestions of where to eat in Porto and Lisbon, and even offered to make reservations for us. So, our lunch at the seafood restaurant A Marisqueira de Matosinhos had been pre-arranged by Pedro, and it was an excellent place that we likely would not have run across on our own. When you walk into the restaurant, you see walls of fish tanks, and an enormous display of fresh shellfish on a table: lobsters, langoustines, crabs, and so on. We were seated and looked through our menus, and felt a bit intimidated because the menu simply had two columns: a name on the left, and a price per kilogram on the right. The problem was that we had very little idea as to what we should order, because the seafood terms were specific species that, of course, weren't in our dictionary. Fortunately, a waiter came by who spoke a little English, and was able to ask us enough questions about what we liked that we ditched the menus and he ordered something for us. A plate of soft, warm, buttered grilled bread and crisps arrived a few minutes later, and we wished we could order a few dozen plates just of the bread, it was so incredible. Our grilled sea bass and turbot arrived shortly thereafter, served simply with potatoes and lemon. The server removed the skin and bones from the fish steaks table-side, giving us only the easily edible meat. The only thing we would do differently if we went back here would be to order the delicious looking appetizer of fresh prawns and crab, which is what nearly every other table ordered to start their lunch today.

We went for a long walk after lunch, along the beach boardwalk in Matosinhos, through the Parque da Cidade, and up Avenida da Boavista. The beach was packed with people, and more people were heading toward it as we were leaving. That seemed a little strange for a Thursday – isn't Porto known as the hardworking city? (We later learned that today was a religious holiday.) It was a hot and sunny day, so we skipped the last couple of kilometers and caught a taxi back to our hotel.

After a bit of a break, we went for one last port tasting, this time at a port bar just a block from our hotel called Vinologia. Upon entering Vinologia, Eric immediately knew this was his kind of place: a ground-floor space with a dark wood bar, dark wood timbers, a staggering number of Port bottles behind the bar open for tasting, and comfy chairs and tables to linger at while sipping port. When we first sat down, we were given menus that offered several different tasting flights: white ports, tawny ports, vintage ports. However, when we explained to the owner, Jean-Philippe, that we were very interested in tasting the Dalva White 1952 recommended by our port newsletter, Jean-Philippe smiled, took away our menus, and said that he'd do a special tasting for us.

Dawn was given three glasses of ruby port: Quinta do Tedo Porto Finest Reserve, Quinta da Prelada LBV 2000, and Quinta de Baldias 2003 Vintage, bottled in 2005. Eric's selection was a Quinta do Vallado 20 year-old tawny, Quinta da Romaneira Colheita 1985 tawny, and Dalva Colheita Golden White 1952. We easily spent an hour sipping these amazing ports and nibbling on milk chocolate, prunes, and golden raisins. We took notes on each one, and debated about what we should bring home. Sadly, they were out of the 1952 port that Eric was intent on getting, and they wouldn't have more until the middle of next week, so we "settled" for three excellent bottles. Later, Eric told Dawn that his new dream is to open a port bar just like Vinologia. Some day! As we were leaving, Jean-Philippe invited us to his new restaurant – tonight was their opening night, and it was just down the block, by our hotel. We had already asked our hotel to make a reservation elsewhere for us tonight, so we thanked him and said we didn't think we'd be able to make it.

As we walked into our hotel just minutes later, the person at the front desk stopped us and apologized, saying that he had been unable to get in touch with the restaurant we had requested – he had tried several times, and they weren't answering their phone. Apparently we were meant to eat at Jean-Philippe's new restaurant. We went to Farol da Boa Nova around 8PM, and that, too, was fortunate because a minute later the last table of the restaurant was filled. This was one of the more multilingual experiences on our trip – the waiters spoke Portuguese, French, and English with the diners, with French generally being the preferred language of the staff. We had a hunch that opening night would give the wait staff some challenges, and indeed it did: waiters colliding with each other, bottlenecks at the computer ordering system, wrong orders (Eric first had no entrée, then the wrong entrée, and finally the right one), and four power outages, each time a complete blackout of the restaurant with just a single emergency exit sign lit up. Everyone took the events in stride, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.