Good Value Guru in Portugal, Episode II

“I’m all for atomic” says one-time SA mining magnate Joe Berardo, racing his five-year old Jag past the windmills that crowd the hills north of Lisbon “but we’ve been sold wind power that costs three times as much and will never meet all our needs. When the wind doesn’t blow, they don’t work and when it blows too hard, they also don’t work.”

Wind power is no new thing in Portugal as the white tri-bladed generators rub shoulders with medieval whitewashed stone mills with jaunty triangular sails. And when the breeze blows in from the Atlantic, the sails of those old flour mills turn clockwise while the 21st century revolves counter-clockwise. These asynchronous mills are a powerful metaphor for Portuguese wines which dance to the beat of two different drummers.

In the first cálice de vinho are rustic wines, typically blends from any number of indigenous varietals like the splendidly named Antão Vaz and Maria Gomes with many reds totally lacking in wood, while in the Riedel Sommelier series are the so-called “international wines” made from French varietals, sometimes blended with local heroes like Touriga Naçional. As Portuguese wine writer Aníbal Coutinho notes “I’ve had so many fights at international competitions where non-Portuguese judges trash Vinho Verdes, damning them as acidic, spritzy and thin, when that is their style.”

While Pinotage is the SA varietal cultivar chauvinists love to rubbish, that role is reprised in Portugal by Baga in the Bairrada appellation where every winemaker you meet knows its secret. Carlos Campolargo, a reincarnation of Cyril Back without cigarettes, compares it to Pinot Noir while another Carlos, Carlos Lucas with a circular concrete cellar (the vinous version of the Guggenheim museum) on the next hill in Ois do Bairro, reckons it’s the Portuguese Nebbiolo. He attempted to prove his hypothesis by presenting two 2003 vintage red blends – Touriga Naçional from Dão and Nebbiolo from Piedmonte called Pião against Touriga and Baga from Bairrada called Encontro #1 – over a dinner of cod cooked by Lot’s wife in his circular cellar and if the wood regimes had been the same (the Pião is matured in acacia) he may have had a point.

Carlos #2

Carlos #2

SA wine lovers will have a chance to taste the wines of Carlos #2 who is involved in a top secret wine project in the Cape that may or may not have something to do with La Motte in Franschhoek. “I’m a crazy guy who makes wine in different countries, even Brazil” admits Carlos #2.