Green Wine and Black Lung
September 27 - October 3, 2018
Clearly, Seester Becky and Brother Brian love us more than all of the rest of you butthorns combined, cause this is the third time they've come to Europe since we moved here and most of y'all ain't been a once. To be fair though, the fact that they keep finding $350 round trip tickets between Oakland and Barcelona has been real helpful in facilitating their annual European adventures, and on this trip they didn't even come to Berlin. They just told us to pick a spot we wanted to go and they would meet us there. Without much hesitation or deliberation, we decided it was time to go back to Portugal.
Of all the nice places, why Portugal, you ask? Well, it's pretty much got the perfect combination of stuff we like: great food, weather, culture, people, and vibe. In late September it's warm but not hot, and there's not too many tourists. We could drink vinho verde (“green wine”) all day every day, and on this trip we planned to. Porto is also the home of the sweet and complex port wine, a drink we understood little of but were eager to delve into. This trip would be the first time Becky and Brian were visiting us without a teenager coming along. So when we thought about what we wanted to do for a child-free family vacation, we didn't get much farther than, "Drink wine in the sunshine." Honestly, you don't need a whole lot more than that for a nice week abroad.
Kirb loves vinho verde so much he seriously considered getting its logo tattooed on his body both times we've visited Portugal (but didn't because he likes to think he's more fun and spontaneous than he actually is). The first place we stopped for snacks and drinks had big cold glasses of the delicious stuff for €1.30 and small pork sandwiches ("bifanas") for €2. After exploring the town a bit at sunset, we found a traditional Portuguese restaurant called Taberna d'Avó where we ordered a spread of small plates like roasted peppers, grilled squid with onions and peppers, fried anchovies, and local sausages. The food was great, and a full bottle of vinho verde for the table cost €5. If only this were the norm everywhere.
The food that Porto is most famous for is a ridiculous sandwich called the francesinha. This word felt like marbles in our mouths the first several times we tried to say it, so from then on we just referred to it as a "fancy Sheena." Endless Mike had a girlfriend named Sheena once, and like this sandwich, that girl was a big mess. This delicious, stupid thing is filled with bologna, fresh sausage, red sausage, beef steak, and ham, then it's covered in melted cheese and a fried egg, served on top of a pile of fries, and doused in a tomato and beer sauce. The fancy Sheena is so unhealthy - such an affront to God and clean living - that it's kind of hard to believe Americans didn't invent it. This thing is nap fuel, my dudes. Eating it makes you think about bad life choices you've made that aren’t even related to the sandwich. Mazz thought she was going to have several of them over the course of the week and after the first one she was like, "No, I think that's all of those I need to eat for the rest of my life."
We ended up having to get into Porto a day earlier than expected because Ryan Air had cancelled our original flight due to a worker strike. Turns out, Ryan Air's employees don't like their shitty company any more than their customers do. When Becky and Brian showed up at the apartment a day after us they were already pretty haggard from the first leg of their trip. On their flight out of Oakland they were sitting next to some young bros who got so wasted that one of them was kicked off the plane before it left the gate (cool vacation to Spain, Chad). The bro next to Becky then proceeded to throw up on her halfway through the 12-hour flight and didn't even apologize. Once they landed, Becky and Brian both got sick in Ireland with the Black Lung - a nasty, nagging, hacking cough that shook the walls with its ferocity. By the time they landed in Porto, they looked like they needed a vacation from their vacation. We kept it simple that night by going to the Portuguese barbecue place ("churrascuria") around the corner from our place for some healing chicken soup, and hearty steak, ribs, and grilled squid.
The internet was out in our rental apartment, and after the guys never showed up to fix it like they were supposed to on Friday night, we had to come to grips with the fact that we were going to have to plan this vacation largely offline. This was a problem, as Becky had school assignments to complete, Mazz had work correspondences to send, and Kirb was going to throw a real fit if he couldn't watch his football games on Sunday. We asked the property management company what they were going to do about it and they basically just shrugged at us. Planning out your daily itinerary in a foreign city without internet is tough. We bought Wi-Fi access hotspots that simply didn't work. We used all the data on our phones. We got frustrated. And then after a few days we walked downstairs and asked the neighbor for his Wi-Fi password, which he happily shared, and life got easier again. Thank you, helpful Portuguese neighbor! Who can even remember what life was like before the internet? What an awful, frightening time that must have been.
Becky had homework and was essentially debilitated by the Black Lung, so she stayed inside for a few days while the rest of us went out in search of sunshine and wine. We made our way along the Douro river into town, strolling though the graveyard and stopping when we needed beers and bifanas. On the other side of the river from the downtown area is where all of the port cellars are located, with each company offering a variety of tours and tastings. The promenade along the water on the sunny Saturday afternoon was filled with people and vendors hawking sunglasses and arts and crafts.
Our first stop was the Taylor winery, which was trying its best to make a fancy-pants first impression with meticulously manicured gardens, employees in white dress shirts and ties, and peacocks strutting around the grounds. We walked into the room with the giant aging barrels and someone came in after us and said that we had to pay if we wanted to be in there. We'd already looked at and taken a picture of the barrels, so we were like, "Nah." This place clearly thought a lot of itself, as their cheapest tasting option of 5 port wines cost €30. We ordered one to share between the three of us, making Brian take the last sip of each glass so that we didn't catch his Irish Fever. The port was inarguably good, with a variety of multifaceted flavors across the different types (Chip Dry, Late Bottle Vintage, 20 Year Old Tawny, Quinta de Vargellas 2015, and Vintage 2009), but that place had a stick up its ass so we made fun of it for a while and then left.
Down the street was the Offley winery, and that place was much more our style. It had one giant room with big communal tables and €6 or €7 for three well-poured glasses of wine. Their port wasn't nearly as nice, but it was a good opportunity to taste a variety of ports that we might actually buy at the store. A whole bottle of Offley costs about €6; a bottle of Taylor, depending on type, is several multitudes more.
There wasn't a whole lot of variety in restaurants in our neighborhood, so we found ourselves in a different churrascuria for dinner that night. Once again there was a big, tasty pile of meat, but they didn't seem too keen on preparing vegetables with the same amount of love. All of us were feeling a bit starved for balanced nutrition by this point, so we shared a big, sad, cold salad to try and feel a little better about ourselves. The true star of the meal was the spitting image of Ernest Hemmingway, who sat at a table behind us with wine, coffee, a newspaper, and a pack of cigars. This man seemed to ooze rich and sorrowful life experience. We wanted to hear all of his stories. "Teach me, papa," we would say. "Teach me, papa."
There's a bookstore in Porto called Livraria Lello that is famous for having inspired J.K. Rowling's vision of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. It's considered one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and to simply get inside the place you need to wait in a line in a separate building to buy a €5 voucher that will grant you entrance (if you buy a book, the €5 is applied towards it). We were surprised to find how small the place actually was, and that no one inside this bookstore seemed particularly interested in buying books, which is probably why they initiated a cover charge. A few mornings earlier in a café we found a great Middle Eastern vegetarian cookbook called New Feast, and as we flipped through it we wanted to make and eat literally every single recipe. They were carrying the book at Livraria Lello, so clearly we couldn't let that €5 voucher go to waste. We've cooked several things out of it since, and they've all been home runs.
Becky was finally feeling better by Monday, so we planned a trip out to the nearby beachside city of Espinho. Getting there was an ordeal though, our travel plans were once again disrupted by striking transportation workers, this time for the trains. After an hour+ wait on a very crowded platform with nothing coming or going, a train finally showed up to take us out to the coast. Every Monday, Espinho has a giant outdoor market that stretches for blocks. You can buy virtually anything at this market: clothing, appliances, decorations, plants, baked goods, live animals, and every kind of delicious Portuguese cured meat and cheese. We loaded up on tasty treats and made our way to the beach, where Brian figured out how to get the cork out a wine bottle by banging it on a bench with his shoe. It worked surprisingly well, though it's not the ideal method for opening a bottle of effervescent wine.
The one thing that Mazz specifically wanted to do in Porto was take a guided tour of wineries in the Douro Valley. Even knowing this well in advance of the trip, we almost blew it by waiting too long to book a spot. Luckily we were able to grab the last few seats in a van tour for the last full day of the trip after everything else was sold out. Our friendly and knowledgeable driver took us a few hours outside of the city into the terraced hills of the valley, telling us about the region and some of its history. Mazz chided Kirb for playing his Nintendo Switch the whole drive instead of staring out the window (he peeked up and saw it every few minutes, shut up).
The first winery we stopped at, Quinto do Tedo, was a fairly small, family-run operation on a beautiful piece of land. The tour took us through the process of picking, sorting, and smashing the grapes and then aging the juice to make port. All of their wines were fantastic, and we would have happily bought some and taken it home if we had checked bags. We wrestled with the idea of paying €200 to have a case sent to us in Berlin, but we couldn't pull the trigger. In hindsight, that was a dumb decision. Where's my port?
The second stop, D'Origem, was also an olive oil producer up until the early 2000s, when the industry switched from the traditional methods of de-oiling an olive to the more efficient cold press method. They still had a functioning McLaren power generator used to run all the machines that was over a hundred years old. The balcony at this place had a stunning panoramic view of the valley, and we felt like big dogs drinking our tasty wine on it. The wine in the Douro Valley is real, real good, and the area is easily as beautiful as any other wine region we've visited. There's really nothing better than having someone else drive you around while you drink all the wine.
By this point, we'd gone to enough markets and specialty shops that our kitchen was full of great stuff to eat and we were running out of time to eat it, so we didn't really need to go out for big piles of meat in a restaurant anymore. Instead we bought all the cheap vinho verdes at the market around the corner (and both kinds of jamón flavored potato chips, and the ketchup ones too) and had ourselves a real snack feast.
Mazz likes to think that she's not afraid of the gondola, but then as soon as she's on it and its hovering high above the ground she loses every bit of cool and starts yelling at the other people inside if they wobble too much. One of the nice ladies on our wine tour had told us there was a great market down on the water to get lunch, so we made that the destination for our final afternoon. And as Becky had missed out on that part of the adventure with homework and Black Lung, we wanted her to experience it as well.
There was this Portuguese restaurant in Seattle back in the early 2000s called Brasa, and for a couple of years Kirb went there for his birthday dinner with his grandpa to get a specific dish. It had suckling pig cooked in a banana leaf, served over a broth of chorizo and clams. Ever since Brasa closed, Kirb has been actively looking for the dish, but hasn't been able to find it. He spent a good 20 minutes talking with our guide from the wine tour about it, but she insisted that Portuguese people don't cook sausage and clams together, and that she'd never seen anyone serve a dish like this. This was disheartening to learn, but Kirb was happy to find that the waterfront market had a stall that only sold slow-roasted suckling pig sandwiches, with €2 glasses of vinho verde to pair, naturally. Someday, Kirb will find his long lost dish. Until then, he's fine settling for whatever other delicious things Portugal gives him instead. It’s never a letdown.