In The Footsteps Of Magellan: Day Drunk In The Douro Valley
In which our narrator hoofs it from vineyard to vineyard, sampling everything
Every restaurant in town is closed, for one reason or another: the weekend, low season, the time of day, the global pandemic, some combination of those. It’s midafternoon and the sun has come out and the streets are glistening with the memory of noontime drizzle. The sign of the Restaurante Tipico reflecting in the shiny surface of the road is both tantalizing and cruel.
My hotel is closed too, it seems. I’ve just arrived in the small town Sabrosa from Porto—a lovely riverside drive followed by a brief, breathtaking, and sometimes terrifying drive up the N323 road from gorgeous Pinhão—where I was carb-loading on francesinhas and bifanas for a week. I had been staying with good friends that I met in Istanbul qyears earlier, cuddling with their hilarious/deranged/non-genius Sri Lankan street dog Stevie, and re-entering the social world as a functioning human adult the first Covid shutdown. It had been a weird few months.
Remember Covid? That was a strange time, huh? Maybe one day I’ll write a Covid anti-travel story and recount the four months living in my mom’s basement in Caraquet, New Brunswick, or the game of Covid Policy Roulette I played for months, trying to find out which European countries allowed Canadians to stick around a bit, but for now the key Covid-era memory is that first strange summer in which the world breathed its collective sigh of relief and decided that the pandemic was over.
That August (of 2020), Europe was open for tourists from most countries after a brief hiatus. The same day the news of a travel thaw was announced, I bought a one-way ticket to Portugal, determined to live week-to-week and to generally wing it with my plans. I landed in Lisbon, hung around for a couple of weeks, then rented a car for a month and took off, first along the coast to Nazare and then to Porto, to close friends and cheap beers and sunshine and adventure.
“You’ve got to see the Douro,” said either Mark or Hayley one night over dinner. “Get up there. Poke about.” They’re English; this is the way they talk. I booked a hotel for the next week in Sabrosa, a pretty old ghost of a place called Casa dos Barros. It’s since been renamed the “Casa dos Barros Winery Lodge by Vintage Theory,” which is too bad. It was neither a winery nor in possession of a theory when I first visited. Nor open.
Sabrosa, like most villages in the Douro, is neither especially old-looking nor new-looking. It has a kind of utilitarian beauty to its outskirts, with little workshops and factories and smiling farmers, and then toward the centre has charming buildings that could be either 30 or 300 years old. It has tourist shops and a little café-bar and a few restaurants that were are all perfectly acceptable when they were open, which they weren’t. These towns, depending on tourism as much as agriculture, suffered bitterly during the pandemic.
This was pre-vaccine, pre-PCR tests, pre-rational thinking. This was post-first-wave lockdown in Canada, social distancing and grocery-delivery washing and mask wearing. This was that weird “We Did It!” summer before the “Oh No, We Didn’t!” fall and winter and subsequent year of more lockdowns and PCR tests for taking a flight and vaccine certificates standing in line at a coffee shop. Summer and early fall are the Douro’s peak tourist seasons. No one had come. No one who lived here really knew what to do.
I had booked the Casa dos Barros through booking.com and had been messaging with someone through the website to coordinate my arrival. The check-in method was “Call when you get there” but Sabrosa was an Internet black hole and I couldn’t get reception. I knocked on the door of the hotel. I got back in my car and drove back down the hairpin road until my phone flashed a signal, then pulled over in a too-small layby and tried calling again. No answer. I messaged through booking.com, then got out of the car and stood around.
The Douro Valley is all spaghetti roads tossed over the hills, and stone walls and old bridges. The highway that runs through here is called the N323, a two-lane highway with a posted speed limit of 90 km/h. I averaged about 50 km/h in the sporty little Seat Ibiza I had rented. This two-lane highway had one shoulder comprising the aforementioned stone wall, on the other side of which was a sheer drop into terraced vineyards and the Douro River far, far below. Driving here is difficult, both due to the improbable road but also due to the stunning views, the desire to always be craning your neck, to be stealing a glance when you should be taking a curve.
Parked in the layby, staring out at the folds of the hills and letting the pungent smells of ripened grapes and olives and figs wash over me as they floated up from the lower parts of the valley, I felt deeply contented. I sat on the roof of the car and soaked it up. Time passed. The sun roasted my little car and me. The olive smell became intoxicating. My phone dinged: I could check in now.
I drove the few kilometres back to Sabrosa and found the door to the hotel slightly ajar. A cleaner was busying himself setting a table in the darkened dining room, and a middle-aged man was standing behind a small desk, waiting for a computer to boot up.
“We don’t have many guests,” he deadpanned, gesturing to the empty, silent lobby. He laughed. “It’s been quiet.” When the computer had loaded, he scanned my passport and took my details and checked me in. He handed me a metal key on a huge keychain. It must have weighed 5 pounds; when I put it in my pocket, I walked with a limp.
“There are two other guests,” he said, leading me to my room. “An American couple. They’re in the room beside you.” (I never saw them, but how funny that we were side-by-side in this vast empty hotel.) He helped me with my suitcase and rolled it into a beautiful room that was costing me just $60 a night. He showed me how things worked, which is the way they always work—the light switches are here, the taps have both hot and cold, this is a towel rack, etc. And as he turned to leave, a thought dawned on him. He had one final question for me:
“Are you here for the wine or for the Magellan?”
I was there for the wine. Harvest season in the Douro had been on my travel bucket list for days, ever since Mark and Hayley had said the word “Douro” back in Porto. In truth, like everything in that year of Covid-time travel, this was a happy accident. Right time, right place, and all that. I discovered that it was the harvest by showing up in the valley. I discovered a company that operated wine-based hikes by Googling “stuff to do in Douro” when already in Sabrosa. And I discovered that Magellan was from Sabrosa by opening the windows of my hotel room and looking straight at his house.
For someone who is fairly obsessed with travel, with stories of adventure and the Age of Exploration and the Silk Roads, with the obscure corners of the earth and those who first mapped them, I knew (know) precious little about Ferdinand Magellan. He was the first to circumnavigate Earth, sort of. I knew (parts of) that. In truth, he wasn’t very good at circumnavigating. It took him three years to sail from Spain back to Spain, and he contrived to die halfway through. Of the five ships and 270 sailors who left Spain in 1519 to faff about on the high seas, only one ship and 18 sailors returned in 1522. But along the way they discovered the aptly-named Strait of Magellan, which may be the world’s worst shortcut.
Like all celebrities, Magellan’s early years have been retrospectively scrutinized, and the house across from the Casa dos Barros has been determined to be his birth place. Or a place he lived as a kid. Or somewhere he stopped off once on a walk to somewhere else, or something. You better believe there’s a plaque out front and that I did not read it. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the plaque would have claimed more than was true about his relationship to the house, which was clearly from the 20th Century and not the 15th. This is always the way. The Cathedral in Sevilla has the Tomb of Colombus, who is buried in the Dominican Republic.
These historical sites often have a tenuous link (at best) to the life of the person being memorialized. History creeps backwards conveniently, and the claimed association is often some momentarily political whim. For the Portuguese, the obsession with their colonial past and their explorers and their naval greatness is like a disease. Look no further than the national obsession with fado, which is essentially old sea shanties sung mournfully by pretty ladies in dark bars. It’s haunting and gorgeous and it longs for the time when Portugal was a powerful naval empire.
Over-educated young people with masters degrees and PhDs were told in the 2010s to leave Portugal and work abroad, and one study from around that time showed that nearly 70% of graduates had plans to leave the country. Those who stayed often found work in the tourist industry, their excellent English proving useful for explaining which tap was hot and which one was cold, but they were unsatisfied. How could they not be? Many young, chatty hotel workers and waiters told me they wished Portugal was still an empire, that Salazar had never died, that things used to be better. Before they were born, they meant. Hundreds of years ago, even. I don’t know—or haven’t discovered—an equivalent in another culture, that mourning for a brighter past.
No wonder the hotel manager was asking if I was there for Magellan, then: the hero not just of his age, but of Portugal’s brightest age. And perhaps Sabrosa was his birthplace. That was important here. People seemed to take strength and pride from it being so. Who was I to question it?
Besides, I was there for the wine.
My first morning in Sabrosa: I wake early and hungry. Dinner the night before had been some bread and cheese from a supermarket in Vila Real, half an hour away, and a pack (or two/three) of Haribo gummies. None of the restaurants in any of the villages around here were open, so my meal was furnished by Lidl. Normally, finding food in Portugal is easy—everything is delicious and cheap and the country has the Iberian love of a hearty meal—but the pandemic changed opening hours, reduced staff, closed restaurants, the works. In my week in the Douro, I never ate at a restaurant; all were shuttered, temporarily or permanently.
My hotel, on the other hand, offered breakfast. This was a tremendous boon. It was basic (short staff and all) but it was served in the lovely garden with views out across the surrounding vine-covered hills. Breakfast closely resembled my home-made dinner: a tasty bun, cold cuts with pre-sliced cheese. But it had the flourish of some tiny jars of jam and a giant carafe of good coffee, which I nursed for hours (I asked for seconds) while I listened to the birds singing as the sun began to bake those vine-covered hills. Then I set out on my first winey walk.
The Quinta do Portal is one of the Douro’s most famous wineries. It’s an architectural gem, this stunning building with cork walls (cork!) that produces wonderful wines. It was only a few kilometres from Sabrosa, so I looked for ways to walk to it without trudging along the paved shoulder of the twisty highway. Hiking trails in the region are well-signed and not especially difficult. Most of the trails around Sabrosa were on old stone roads that had been used by the wine producers for decades, if not centuries.
To walk through the fields and old stone roads would only take an hour and a half if you hurried, but I found hurrying impossible. The day was warm-bordering-on-hot, the light up here soft and pretty, and the smells heavy and gorgeous. Those ripe grapes, the pungent olives, those scents that had wafted up from the valley the day before were now all around me. There’s nothing like it, a countryside in full bloom like this. The old roads snaked between different parcels of land, a tumbling rock wall on either side of the road and trees drooping over these walls, beautiful ancient olive trees with their stubby gnarled trunks and their silver-green leaves weighed down with ripe fruit. I was carrying my camera and trying to take pictures that would somehow capture the combination of filtering light and heavy smells, and routinely failed. I dallied along these roads, and eventually came to a small ruined-looking church at the edge of a vineyard. I sat on its ruined-looking wall, snacking on some bread and cheese I had grabbed from the hotel breakfast, enjoying the heat on the rocks and feeling happily alone in this lovely place.
Suddenly, the church bell began to chime, rupturing the quiet field like a thunderclap, or a gunshot. Birds startled to the sky. A sheep made some noise somewhere. I jumped slightly with the sudden sounds, then laughed quietly at my embarrassment at being scared by some bells and a distant bleating. I brushed the breadcrumbs from my legs and set off again, down into the dry valley beyond the church.
On the other side of the valley, the trail narrowed and became for the briefest of moments hike-like, a steep sandy path rising sharply out of the dry creek bed at the bottom of the valley. After a few minutes, it widened out into another dirt track and then a paved road and suddenly I was on the main road, starting at the crossroads between two other small towns. The Quinta do Portal was just down the road, but directly beside me was a smaller producer called the Quinta do Beijo. A dump truck rumbled up the little road that crossed the main road here, overloaded with juicy red grapes, and bumped its way into the Quinta do Beijo. I filed this information away for later and headed up the road to the main attraction, the Quinta do Portal.
I walked up the beautiful manicured driveway, mysteriously empty of cars, toward the huge front door. I leaned in as I pushed, as it looked heavy. It didn’t budge. Of course, I thought. How stupid. I pulled the massive handle instead, bracing my feet against the weight. It didn’t budge. I realized, sheepishly, that I must have been at the wrong door, then walked around the side of the building, where there was no door. This was weird. I went back to the main door and looked for posted hours—maybe I was catching them during their siesta, though it was still early for that. Nothing. I knocked on the door. Nothing. I banged on the door. Nothing.
I opened useless Google Maps and looked up the hours. It said the winery was open, but this was Portugal and this was Covid, so these details meant little. I tried calling, and got a voicemail recording in perfect English: “Our winery will be closed until further notice due to the Covid-19 global pandemic.” The curse of aftersight. Still on Google Maps, I tapped on the Quinta do Beijo, which at the time had very few reviews, maybe one. Google claimed it was open, but now I knew better. They had a phone number listed, so I called. A friendly voice answered in Portuguese.
“Do you speak English?” I asked sheepishly.
“Of course!” the voice said. “How can I help you?”
“Are you … open?” I asked.
“Ummm… kind of! Sure! We can be open,” he said. “What are you looking for?”
“Wine?” I said, and he laughed. “No, I was hoping I could take a tour,” I continued. I was winging it. “I’m a travel writer and I’m nearby and want to learn about wine production in the Douro.” I was really winging it.
“Oh, amazing!” he said. “We’d love to show you around! When are you available? When will you arrive in Douro?”
“I’m here now,” I said with tremendous understatement.
“Here where?” he asked.
“Here in Douro. I’m staying in Sabrosa. But I’m here… here. I’m across the road,” I explained.
He laughed again, a warm and happy laugh, a laugh without barriers. I already liked him.
“Okay, can you give us, like, 15 minutes? We have to turn on the lights and get some sausage.” This seemed fair to me. “See you soon,” he said, and hung up.
An hour later, I was sitting at a plastic table in front of the Quinta do Beijo, snacking on a sausage and cheese with a half-dozen very tired people and a half-dozen bottles of very excellent wine. I’d just finished my impromptu tour of the winery, led by João Monteiro, the friendly voice from the phone, and his sister Catarina and her young son. Like he had said, they were only kind-of open for tours. Joao and Catarina spoke excellent English and we moved slowly around the winery, chatting and joking.
Their showroom was partly under construction, some of their huge, century-old barrels were being cleaned, many of the bottles were unlabelled. But the quinta was in full production mode. Truckfuls of grapes kept arriving and being dumped into a huge crusher in front that was connected underground to stone tanks inside, where the grapes would macerate for a few days before being strained and processed and put into barrels. I had been to wineries before, but it only occurred to me when I walked into that tank room that I had never really been around wine being made. The smell of it is heavenly, yeasty and juicy, at once fresh and not fresh. Wine had been made in this room for ages, and its smell lived on in the cracks between the tiles and in the old wood of the doors. That day, it was overwhelming, the skins and stems floating at the top of tank giving off the most mouth-watering aromas. It made me instantly hungry to stand there, breathing deep grapey gulps of air.
We moved on to a room with hundreds of barrels, some maturing port and others holding table wines. Something like 80% of all grapes produced in Portugal must be sold to the Port producers, and most of that gets exported through the main seven or eight labels: Taylor’s Sandeman, Graham’s, etc. Small producers who had met their quotas are then permitted to use their remaining grapes for their own private label wines and ports, most of which are not exported, or not exported in huge numbers.
João explained all of this as we meandered through the barrels. We had collected a little retinue by now, his nephew dribbling a soccer ball along behind us, his sister running back and forth to get glasses, and a few of the winemakers and farmhands tagging along to try to listen in to the tour. It had been a while, João explained, since they had given a tour. Excitement was building in our small group. One of the other workers suddenly got excited and said something in Portuguese, and João’s face lit up. “He says we need to try this one,” he said, stopped beside one barrel in particular. Glasses materialized in hands, and someone handed João what looked like a huge eye dropper. João popped the cork out of the top of the barrel and inserted the dropper, then pulled it out and squirted a big taste into each person’s glass. This was a ruby port, not quite ten years old, lacking the defined sweetness that it would later take on. It was fresh and juicy and delicious. Everyone made approving sounds. We clinked our glasses and drank to its promise, some excellence they all knew was coming but that I couldn’t fully grasp.
Someone else said something and tapped on another barrel. Its cork was removed, the dropper inserted, fresh glasses brought out, the dropper emptied. This was an even older port, rich and sweet and smooth. Another barrel was opened. There were explanations for each one, but I was starting to lose the thread on the specifics and getting caught up in the sheer joy everyone took in being here, the love for having guests.
We took our glasses outside and sat at the plastic table, watching more trucks arrive with more grapes. We passed around a delicious oaked white wine and snacked on cheese and salamis. João was telling stories about the wines, the specific grapes, the method of production, but he was also revealing something special about Portuguese wine without really meaning to, planting a seed in my brain that would take the rest of the week to grow. There was passion and expertise everywhere here, in every fold of these hills.
Eventually, reluctantly, I said my goodbyes, leaving behind six bottles of wine that I’d come back for with the car the next day. I walked back to Sabrosa the long, wobbly way, down through the gulley and past the maybe-abandoned church and up the stone paths to the hotel across from Magellan’s house.
I met Antonio Henriques in the town square of Ervedosa Do Douro, on the opposite side of the Douro Valley from my hotel. This meant descending to river on the winding N323 to Pinhão and then ascending up an even windier section of the N323 back the other side. I had checked out of the hotel in Sabrosa early to meet Antonio, skipping breakfast. I had optimistically stopped strategically in Pinhão to find a coffee, but nothing had been open.
“Oh, yeah,” Antonio half-sympathized when I told him about this caffeine-related tragedy. “Pinhão has had a lot of trouble lately.” He was waiting for me as I pulled up to park the car by the small church in the town center, wearing jeans and a sporty shirt and hiking boots, with a small backpack and a baseball cap. He was casual and easy going and shook hands firmly. “We’ve all had a bit of a slow time this year. Let’s have a coffee at my house and I can explain.”
We had been in touch for the past few days over email. Alongside his wife Sylvia, Antonio runs Douro Walks, which operates what he calls a hiking excursions and which I call a boozy treks. We had agreed to go for a long walk around the surrounding hills—“Nothing too demanding,” Antonio promised—and take in some views, maybe go check out the vines that his in-laws, Sylvia’s parents, managed nearby.
The first stop on our wine hike was Antonio’s house—where I’d be staying for the night—just up from the town square. Ervedosa Do Douro is a lot like Sabrosa, vaguely pretty in places and totally functional and bland in others. Like most small Douro Valley towns, it had a community olive press near the center, which on this September morning was in operation, filling the town with that bittersweet, fleshy smell of raw olive oil. Antonio explained to me that these communal presses functioned with a 10% surcharge, which was payable only in olive oil. Anyone could bring their olives here to be pressed, but would have to agree to give a portion to the community to sell in its agricultural shop. Most towns in rural regions around Portugal and Spain have these kinds of shops selling oil and local honey and jams and cured meats, but I hadn’t known about this pay-in-oil arrangement. I loved it.
Antonio had a natural gift for explaining. He was a former schoolteacher who had moved from Maderia with Sylvia and their kids back to her home town here in the Douro. They had bought an ancient house on the main street of Ervedosa, with a huge wooden gate that swung inward majestically from the narrow road to reveal a courtyard and a sprawling house rising on both sides. We dropped my bags in the guestroom that Antonio and Sylvia usually rented on Airbnb. They hadn’t had a guest since March, Antonio told me. He hadn’t had anyone come for a hike in those six months either. He had taken up temporary work on the tourist boats that cruised the river starting from Pinhão, but there were so few tourists that those weren’t really running either.
Over coffee, he told me about the valley in better times, with its hundreds of good wines and its full river boats and its pretty tourist train. The excellent restaurants at the vineyards and the squares bursting with life. “You’ll have to come back when things are more open,” he demanded. His excitement was palpable and catching and before we had even set out on the hike, I had promised that I would return.
The hike was as advertised, really—not too demanding, especially at first. We wound our way upwards out of Ervedosa, past the tidy school and some big houses that suggested a prosperity belied by this weird, quiet year. We walked on paved roads for a while, our view growing ever more magnificent as the valley spread out beneath us, its steeper parts far in the distance a dark green, the river shimmering northward until it disappeared around a bend. After an hour or so we turned away from the river valley, and the trail rose and fell more dramatically with the folds of the land. We saw wild pigs seeking acorns and sheep roaming around. We saw juicy figs and apples exploded on the paths where they had fallen overripe to earth from overwhelmed trees. Antonio pointed out wineries here and there that were featured on his longer circuits. We wouldn’t be stopping at any of these today. He had other plans for me; he was going to put me to work.
I never found out how old Antonio’s father-in-law Sebastião and mother-in-law Maria Augusta were. It seemed rude to ask, even though my question was motivated by awe, even though it contained what I thought of as a kind of compliment. They had the dark, sun-wrinkled skin of those who are always outdoors and the white hair of those who don’t care about appearing old, but they had a fierce strength, too, a rural hardness, an energy and work ethic belonging to someone far younger.
They work a steep and small parcel of land above Ervedosa, which Antonio and I arrived at the longest-way round, having walked for four hours to go just up the road from the village. The vines were full to bursting, and I was told as we arrived that it was harvest day and asked if I would like to see how the grapes were picked and maybe help a little. This thrilled me.
These terraced vineyards make modern harvesting methods next to impossible. The vineyard is too steep and crowded for big farm equipment to move around, so most of the nurturing and harvesting is done manually, with simple tools or by hand. It’s difficult work, this clambering around in the bushes with pruning shears and a plastic bucket, but Sebastião and Maria Augusta wore it well.
They greeted us warmly, but in that non-fussed way of the farmer: a wave and a smile and a beckoning to make oneself useful. Antonio introduced me to the other farm workers, then ignored the call to work and lead us to a small room in one of the nearby buildings. Maria Augusta soon arrived with a huge pot of rice with tomatoes and chickpeas and Tupperware full of pasteis do bacalau—cod fritters heavy with sticky cheese, ideal protein balls for manual labour—and a stone jug of sweet red wine. Antonio poured two huge glasses and we gulped these down alongside bottles of water. We rested for a few moments, Antonio poured two more glasses of wine, and we sat in the shady room picking at cod cakes, avoiding work. I had never felt more Portuguese.
Soon enough we were among the vines, gathering ancestral grapes from some 100-year-old plants. The red grapes grown here are small and dark, almost purple, almost black, and somehow always hidden amongst the leaves. At each vine, I would stop and lift some of the lower branches to see if this plant had produced fruit this year, and if it had and the grapes were large enough, would snip them off with my shears and add them to the bucket I was half-carrying, half-scooting along the steep ground with me. When the bucket was full, I’d have to shout “Ola!” and wave and one of the more experienced/stronger workers would bring me an empty one and carry the heavy, stained, delicious-looking pail off to be added to bigger pails of grapes being loaded on an ancient pickup truck.
It was pleasant, tiring work. I loved being up here above the world, working with my hands, helping these kind people tend to their land. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an industrial production. These were people gathering grapes planted by some long-dead family member in a little pocket in the hills in a quiet part of a quiet country. I worked near Antonio, but pleasantly apart too. We focussed on the grapes. After a couple of hours, we’d picked the hillside clean. The grapes were all loaded on the truck, and the afternoon sun hung hot and high above. Sebastião came by to pat us on the back and offer swigs from a communal bottle of something sweet and warm, and through Antonio asked me if I had enjoyed myself. I told him I had, and asked what I thought was a simple question: how could he tell when the grapes were ready to harvest?
“By the alcohol content,” he answered through his son-in-law. “I just taste them.”
I didn’t really understand, so he offered a demonstration. We walked a couple of rows of vines up the hill, where he lifted the leaves on a few plants. He gestured at one in particular, and Antonio and I came closer. Sebastião pulled his shears out and snipped of a fat, juicy bunch of Moscato grapes. He held them up to his nose and breathed deeply, then passed them in front of my face, then Antonio’s. We inhaled deeply too, breathing yeast and sugar and soil. The grapes smelled deeply sweet, a little funky. Sebastião pinched one between his thumb and finger and smelled it again, then popped a few in his mouth. His expression changed. He handed some to me, and they tasted like, well, wine. My expression remained the same. He handed some to Antonio, who understood immediately what had happened.
“They’re ready,” Sebastião explained. “Today. These are probably around 14.5% alcohol already.” He munched a few more. So did I. So did Antonio. So did I, again. They were delicious. And I was trying to fit in. Sebastião explained a few things to Antonio, who instead of translating to me responded. They chatted for a couple of minutes, all the while I was pop, pop, popping the little wine sacks. This was living. In time, Antonio turned to me and translated the conversation—like we were in a badly dubbed movie—as, “We need to get back to work.”
“Was that all he said?” I asked. I’d had enough grapes to find this very funny.
“More or less,” Antonio replied, handing me back my bucket and shears. “Now we have to get all the white grapes, too.”
I got a head start by putting the rest of the bunch in my bucket.
Then, as instructed, I got back to work, moving more slowly than while picking the red grapes, mostly due to a long day trudging up and down the slopes. Despite the exhaustion and the wine legs kicking it, it remained deeply pleasant work. We were encouraged to snack freely as we worked, and the sun was warm and the world was still apart from the shuffling of our shoes on the rocky soil as we moved from row to row. How remarkable this all was, how earthen and old and beautiful. The intuition involved in it moved me. Sebastião could smell and taste the alcohol percentage, he could sense the readiness of a plant to be harvested and turned into something different and better. That knowledge was imprinted on him by this place, by a life lived on these slopes. His son in law had some of it, his daughter surely. Perhaps his grandkids too had this feeling in their skin, this sixth sense, too? Maybe they all did.
There were far fewer white grapes clinging to the ancestral plants than there had been red grapes. We were done in about an hour and a half, during which time we had all freely eaten the equivalent of a bottle of wine. Maria Augusta passed around cod cakes to soak some of it up, while Sebastião made some calculations. We had only picked about four crates (big rubber garbage pails) of white, which wouldn’t be enough. Antonio and I loaded into the cab of his funny little farm truck, and Sebastião drove with one hand while the other worked an old flip phone the whole way down the hill into Ervedosa, calling other farmers he knew. By the time we had pulled up at his house in the center of town, there was another truck waiting with 10 more crates of kind-of similar grapes. White, ripe, and close enough.
I never saw the upstairs of the house, because all the action was in the basement garage, where the family had a stone tank and an old manual press for crushing the grapes. This was another magnificent place, not in the grand way of the hilly vineyard and its forever views, but in the sensible organized way of a darkroom where the world’s best photographs get developed. Two walls were bare cement, one was a rolling garage door, and the fourth was a brick wine rack with hundreds of dusty, unlabelled bottles with little pieces of paper stuck to the bricks to mark vintages. Two large barrels were raised off the floor on wooden stands, and like everywhere else in the Douro, it all smelled incredible.
Sebastião leaned his head into the stairwell and shouted upward, and his grandkids dutifully appeared to help. One carried a cat, which was her way of helping. Another climbed up onto the stone tub in the corner, which stood shoulder height, and turned the hand crank on the grape crusher while the rest of us took turns lifting one of the huge trash cans to dump out the grapes. When the boy got tired, Sebastião himself climbed into place and crushed the rest of the grapes. All told, it took no more than two hours from the moment we left the farm until all of the grapes we had picked (and those of a neighbour) has been processed.
Sebastião had one friendly point to prove, and dipped a funny-looking glass vial into the fresh wine. He then dropped what looked to be a 200-year old thermometer into the vial, which bobbed around until it floated more or less in one spot. He turned the vial so I could see it; a series of numbers and lines, floating at exactly 14.5. This was the alcohol content of this new wine. He had been right to the exact degree. He laughed and squeezed my shoulder. Now we could drink.
He grabbed a bottle from one of the recesses in the wall, and Antonio got excited. “This is special!” he said, grabbing my arm a little. “This is exciting. We don’t usually drink these.” Glasses were shouted for and a corkscrew procured and an old cork doggedly extracted and cups poured immediately. The Portuguese and the Spanish don’t believe in letting it breathe—wine like this is consumed as soon as the bottle is opened. Everyone assembled (which included the neighbours who had sold Sebastião some grapes, some relatives I missed the names of, myself, Antonio, the grandkids, the cat) made pleased sounds at the excellence of the wine. For his next trick, Sebastião opened one of the barrels and decanted some port into an empty bottle. He poured a few glasses. He passed these around and as I took my first sip, time just … sort of … stopped.
It was the best port I had ever tasted. (It remains so to this day.) I couldn’t understand it. It was like a sherry, almost, an oloroso or a palo cortado: it wasn’t overly sweet but had its sugary notes. It was slightly charred tasting. It was round and full and it lingered a long, long time. There was a flavour I couldn’t place. I took another sip to try again, and failed.
Sebastião saw my face and looked pleased. He tapped the barrel and said something quietly. “Chestnut,” Antonio whispered, not wanting to break the spell on the room. We stood there in silence for a while, sipping away, appreciating a masterpiece. At some point, the cat squirmed out of the girl’s hands and meowed, and we all drifted back into the room from wherever the port had transported us. Everyone resumed some sort of movement except me; I just wanted to keep sipping this perfect drink.
Sebastião’s movement was to go to the corner of the room near the wine tank. He rinsed the port bottle there and then dipped his glass into the raw wine at the top of the tank. He smelled it and tasted it, seemed pleased. Then he opened the tap at the bottom of the tank and filled the bottle he had used for the port more-or-less to the same level. He removed the cork in the top of the barrel and put a funnel in place, then poured the new wine from the bottle into the funnel. He gave me and Antonio a little wink and said something in Portuguese, which was translated as, “Some out, some in.”
And with that, the glass of port still in my hand became something new. It became unique. It became irreplaceable. What was in the barrel was no longer the same as what was in my glass, and never would be again. This was how it worked, I learned: some in, some out. The port was always generally port, but it was never the same thing twice. Melancholy swelled within me briefly, but was quickly replaced with something else. A feeling of pride, maybe, a sense of being lucky to have this little taste of a perfect thing in my hands, and a knowledge of exactly how long it would last. I tipped the glass back and finished it off.
“Please tell him it’s perfect,” I said quietly to Antonio. He did, and Sebastião, suddenly shy, nodded his head in thanks. “Does he sell it?” I asked. Not really, no, was the answer. That was fine, I reasoned. Life was for living in those perfect little moments. It was getting late, anyway. Sylvia was waiting at home for us with dinner, dessert, and more wine.
I left the Douro the next day. Antonio walked me through the quiet town to my car, seeming no worse for wear from the night before. I was fuzzyheaded but enthralled, still buzzing from it all. As a thank you present (in addition to refusing payment for the bedroom for the night and the tour and any of the food), Antonio had a surprise for me. He handed me a huge plastic jug—five litres, maybe more—wrapped in plastic.
“Sebastião wanted you to have this,” he said. The port. My port. Or a slightly different version of it, refreshed with new wine after our glasses had been taken out. I was deeply touched. This port now had grapes I had picked in it too. There was no better gift, this one-of-a-kind thing. I hugged Antonio, and told him to pass it on. I doubted, slightly, that he would.
Driving south on the arid backroads to the Algarve, where I was meeting Mark and Hayley and two of their friends for a couple days of planned beachbumming and hiking around Lagos, my thoughts kept turning to the jug of port sloshing around on the floor of the back seat. What had been poured into my jug would have been topped up with something else again. Some out, some in.
That night in Lagos went as the first night anywhere goes with Mark and Hayley. Beer, wine, gin, port, wine, beer, a multi-day hangover. The next morning’s run didn’t materialize, nor the next day’s hike, nor the hike the day after that. I didn’t see them until the day I was leaving, heading back to Lisbon to fly to Turkey. The port was still in the back seat of the car. I called Mark and we met for breakfast, and I told him the story of the wine hike and Sebastião and I poured my heart out to him about the perfect port and changeability of life and the fleeting moments and how nothing stays the same. Then he walked me to my car and gave me a characteristic, “Safe travels, Drewski,” and I gave him the port. “Take this home and cherish it,” I begged him. He said he would.
I drove away. I went to Turkey. Covid returned. Borders began to close. I wasn’t allowed to board a flight back to Lisbon from Turkey because the Netherlands, where I’d transit and enter Schengen, was now closed to Canadians. I barely made it back at all, flying through Munich the next day before Schengen closed completely. I spent time in Lisbon, a month in the Algarve, and when I eventually went back to Porto to dog sit Stevie, the pandemic and the daily rule changes took up everyone’s mental energy. I had forgotten about the port.
A couple of years later, I was back in Porto, sharing a port with Mark in a sunny square. He was asking about wine tourism and the Douro and looking for tips for a trip they were planning. I remembered the port. I imagined it tucked away safely at home, that it had been saved for me until this moment, this happy reunion.
“Oh right!” Mark said, flashing his cheeky grin. “We had that in Lagos. Finished it off on the last night. Good stuff, that. Thanks again, Drewski!”
Some out, some in.