The Douro Valley is a prime winemaking region a couple of hours from Porto, and where many of the grapes that are used for port wine are grown. So we took a full day to travel out there with a small group of other American tourists (and our tour guide) to see how it works. We’ve done winery tours many times before, most recently during our trip to Oregon earlier this year when we visited the Willamette Valley. So the real reason for this trip was not to learn about wine making, but to spend the day in a beautiful location, taste a bunch of wine, and have a great meal.

Our guide, Sandra, picked us up at precisely 9:10 in her van, and we headed across the city to get the others: a single woman named Lindsay, and a couple named Hillary and Steve (1).

Our first stop after the long drive was the Quinta do Cume (2). This is a small vineyard and winery. They grow the grapes, crush them in granite vats with people stomping on the grapes with their feet (3), then put in the barrels and ultimate have them bottled at a bottling factory. The views from the place were breathtaking: terraced vineyards and mountains surrounding the Douro River (4).

We tasted four wines: a “green” wine which is relatively low in alcohol, a white, and two reds. I enjoyed the tasting, but the wines weren’t great.

After leaving we headed to a tiny hotel and restaurant with another spectacular view for lunch. We never saw the rooms, but it apparently only had a couple. The five of us ate in a lovely dining room with the view, had a fancy dinner and had another five wines: a red and a white, and then a selection of three ports with desert.

After lunch we went on to our next winery stop, as we were just starting to get loosened up. This was Quinta do Panascal. I’m not sure how many of the winemaking steps they engage in, as we never made it past the patio where we had another set of wines to taste. As usual, we had a selection: four wines from Panascal, and a special wine that Sandra brought. It’s legal to make your own wine in the basement for your own consumption, You can’t sell it, but you can give it away. I’d say her wine was as good as any of the commercial wines we tasted.

We didn’t get back to Porto until 6:45pm, a few minutes after the scheduled time (5).

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(1) Sadly, neither of us can remember what “Steve’s” name really was. So just consider it a pseudonym.

(2) “Quinta” = estate; “Cume” = hilltop or summit; Estate on the Summit.

(4) I flashed on Lucy & Ethel …

(4) The Douro starts in Spain and flows generally west through Portugal and the Douro Valley, past Porto to the Atlantic Ocean.

(5) We’ve had trips with schedules before, especially the two cruises we took a few years ago. We basically don’t like being scheduled while on vacation. We especially don’t like having to set alarm clocks every morning while on vacation. And despite our removal of several of the activities our agent had suggested for us, we still wound up feeling over-scheduled. This is an important learning for our next trip.