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This year, the Nestle wine club chose Porto as its destination for the wine trip, and this weekend was the culmination of months of planning.

I left on Thursday – travel plans were up to individual participants – and I arrived in Porto in the afternoon after a fairly straightforward trip. Dinner plans were a bit convoluted after lots of last-minute changes, including Markus and I getting into the wrong Uber to get into Porto… In the end, Markus, Grietje and I found a little hole in the wall restaurant and we had a nice dinner. I realized that I’d really need to be careful about my allergies, as even after letting the server know I was allergic to garlic, my plate of olives were covered in it. Still, no harm done and we had a nice meal. As we were walking back to the hotel, we noticed that Porto doesn’t have pigeons in the parks and streets, it has seagulls!

Friday morning was a free period, as we’d agreed that planned activities would start in the afternoon, when everyone should have arrived. I walked around the old town, saw the Chapel of Souls, the Church of Saint Ildefonso, Porto Cathedral, then crossed the Luis 1 bridge over the Douro river into Vila Nova de Gaia to go scope out all of the Porto warehouses. I visited Kopke on my own, Sandeman with Patrick and Denise, and then we met everyone to visit Ramos Pinto and Corvos. After the last tasting, we had dinner reservations in a restaurant in the Bolhao market. Although there was a miscommunication of my allergies (you’re only allergic to bug chunks of garlic, right?), dinner was sorted out and was quite (!) filling and tasty. After dinner, I was dragged out to find a cocktail bar that could accommodate a group of our size – easier said than done. In the end, we found the bar attached to a 5* hotel, that had the advantage of being almost empty, snazzy, and where we could hear ourselves talk. One thing that really, really shocked me about Porto is the number of times I got accosted in the street to buy drugs (cocaina! hashish! marijuana!).

Saturday started out with a bit of drama, when our coach went to the wrong hotel and the driver waited until the dispatch office opened to get confirmation – but the confirmation was still the wrong address. He didn’t speak English, no one spoke Portuguese, but we managed to get the point across using broken Spanish :) We got it sorted out, but left an hour later than expected. We were worried that this would have a knock-on effect with all of the other visits, but our buffers managed to prevent this in the end. The driver also had the wrong stops programmed, but we got that sorted out.

First stop was Aveleda, which was a beautiful estate that produced vinho verde. The family that owns the estate is, in a word, LOADED. This is one of several domains the family owns – they have several. They own a zoo. The property is huge, boasts several beautifully manicured gardens, houses, cottages, nationally registered historical monuments, a goat tower, and a chateau. It’s also their weekend estate… The wine was also really nice! After that, we were on our way to the Douro valley – about an hour away on the motorway.

Getting there went fine, until we starting going down the twisty goat passes to get to Nova. At one point, there was about an inch of clearance between a stone wall, a house and the coach mirrors. The view, once we got there, was superb. We also got lucky with the weather, as it was supposed to rain, but it was a really nice day. Nova gave us a tour of the biggest privately owned collection of historical wine making artefacts in Portugal, then we had a tapas buffet while we had the wine tasting.

The final stop of the day was Tedo. Personally, I think it was the best stop of the day. The ambiance when we got there was festive, as they had singers and accordions playing outside. In a slight miscalculation on my part, the meat and cheese boards were probably too much, esp considering that we’d just left the previous meal only 40 minutes before, but the food and the wine were very good, and they treated us to a couple of wines that weren’t actually included in our reserved tasting.

We headed back to Porto with full bellies and people nodded off a bit in the bus. We had originally planned to have some downtime before dinner, but that didn’t happen because of traffic so we went straight to dinner, which was very nice but in a room that was waaaay too hot and stuffy. I begged off drinks that night and went to the hotel to have a cool shower before bed.

Sunday was a relaxing day. We were back in Vina Nova de Gaia, where we had a 6-bridge boat cruise on the Douro and then a cocktail making workshop at Cruz. Rule of thumb: white port + ginger + rosemary + ginger ale is nice. Rose port + orange + mint + tonic is nicer. That was the last planned activity before people went their separate ways. I had a few things I wanted to do but because of timing, I could only go visit Ferreira before heading to the airport.

One of the things that was really good about this trip is that each visit was somewhat different. Aveleda was vinho verde and the estate was magnificent. Nova was one of the oldest quintas, but completely modernized its production methods when they switched from Porto to DOC wines. Tedo is remains a very small quinta that still does traditional foot stomping in a lagar. Ramos Pinto, focused on the business and marketing decisions of its founder. Corvos is also a very small and traditional and boutique quinta that has its own spin on tawny blending (where in contrast to standard labeling, where the bottle age is an average or all ports within the blend, all the ports within a Corvos blend are _at least_ the age on the bottle). Sandeman and Ferreira are f’n monsters that product 20M+ bottles a year, but their cellars are also magnificent and HUGE! Ferreira had a wooden vat that could store 72K liters at once. Madness.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 19:30 but because of torrential weather in Geneva, the incoming flight was delayed. The flight before mine cooled its heels on the tarmac for about 1.5h before finally being able to leave – well after the time I’d already arrived at the airport. The flight was getting progressively more and more delayed. At some point, after the latest round of easyjet roulette, I decided to book a hotel room near the airport just in case I got stranded. It was 65 euro that I ate in the end, but like what happened with the train/ferry at Calais, if I hadn’t done it, things would have gone badly. At one point our arrival to Geneva was forecast to be at 2am – which would have been fun because Geneva airport has to close between 00:30 and 05:00 because of noise levels. Had that happened, we would have been diverted to Lyon or somewhere as equally inconvenient. Given the heat, noise, stress, booze and complete lack of information at airports these days, I’m always amazed that more people don’t end up going postal. I’ve only really seen that happen once, in Ottawa, a long time ago. In the end, we ended up leaving at around 22:00 and landed at around 00:30. Katy was there to pick us up – I was travelling back with someone from the group.

All pictures here: porto_jun_2024