Given the Good Value Guru’s criterion of value for money when assessing wine, it was most appropriate that our last day in Portugal was spent visiting the most underrated wine region in the country: Tejo, centred on Santarém, one hour north of Lisbon. Around 100 million litres of wine is grown along the river Tagus each year, yet only 12% ends up in bottle certified at Tejo wine. A blind tasting of 10 whites, 5 rosés and 15 reds at the regional regulatory body, confirmed the value for money proposition.

Lunch followed in a converted olive oil cellar at Quinta da Ribeirinha in Póvoa de Santarém, a small family producer owned by brain surgeon Joaquim Cândido whose son Rui and daughter Mariana handle the day-to-day running of the business. Joaquim’s father still potters around the vineyards, keeping an eye on the grapes used to make the internationally successful Vale de Lobo – soon to be renamed Valley of the Wolves for the US market.

Joaquim

Our final visit was to Casa Cadaval in Muge where Countess Theresa Schönborn took us on a wild 4×4 ride to see her horses and cows through waterlogged fields on her 5400ha estate which makes Paul Clüver’s 2500 MKOW (Mountain Kingdom of Wine) in Elgin look positively Lilliputian. Theresa is an auspicious blend (her mother had Italian and Portuguese parents while her father was an Italian/German cross) as are her Padre Pedro budget blends: white, rosé and red, the latter listed in Marks & Spencer last year. 40 000 bottles of Portuguese wine closed with a cork on a UK supermarket shelf – António Amorim’s wet dream.

All this genetic blending is quite ironic, as when Theresa’s father married the daughter of the Marquesa in 1953, with typical German thoroughness, he announced that the traditional way of growing many different varietals in the same vineyard and making a field blend was not the way to do things and started the revolutionary practice of mono-varietal vineyards. Today Cadaval has a range of three single varietal wines: a wonderfully elegant Pinot Noir, an exotically perfumed Trincadeira and my own favourite, an intense Cabernet Sauvignon, all made from 50+ year old vines.

Countess Theresa

Countress Theresa admits to dreaming in Portuguese so no surprises that her flagship red is a Touriga Naçional-dominated blend along with Alicante Bouschet and Trincadeira. Perhaps with a bit of Afrikaans thrown in, as her nanny was a South African, Miss Martin, herself a blend of black African and Indian.