Search Results for: Portugal and wine

Fine wines in horse-and-buggy Lancaster County

Fine wines in horse-and-buggy Lancaster County

While you're as likely to get stuck behind a horse-drawn buggy as a tractor on Lancaster County's rural roads, the region is more than straw-hat and gray-bonnet country these days. Historic dairy and row crop farming is giving way to vineyards and hop yards as farm wineries and craft breweries pop up in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Traditionally, this has been a region of fruit winemaking, followed at the end of the 20th century by a reliance on French-American hybrid grapes. Slowly but surely, wineries focused on traditional European wine grapes have begun to prove that Lancaster County is fertile soil indeed for well-made classic wines. In the quest to look at the future of Pennsylvania winemaking, I was able to visit a pair of very...Read More

The Wine List on HungryTravelers

 Here are some links to posts about these wines:Argentina-MendozaBarons de RothschildCôtes de ProvenceFranciacortaFrescobaldiMontepulciano d'AbuzzoNew ZealandPantelleriaPaso RoblesPortugalProseccoSan Luis ObispoTrentino VQA OntarioWashington State
Find homey holiday tastes in these New England stores

Find homey holiday tastes in these New England stores

As the Eating Season approaches, we start craving certain flavors that we associate with the winter holidays spent with family. We want the taste of home—whether that's a cuisine from the country where our ancestors originated or something forged by Norman Rockwell and Betty Crocker. Truth is, we love to forage for festive foodstuffs. As a service to our New England readers, here are five essential shops around the region where we find special holiday foods. This post is adapted from a piece we wrote last year in the Boston Globe travel section. BRITISH AISLES Denise and Gerry Pressinger founded British Aisles more than two decades ago so that ex-pats like themselves could get everyday British foods such as HP Sauce and the pickled onions...Read More

Portugal: wines from the edge of Europe

Having just spent a week popping around some of the wine regions of Portugal, I'm struck again at what good value modern Portuguese wines offer and, with the exception of port, how little known they are in the U.S. As noted in my last post (see below) even the port world is trying to catch up with contemporary drinkers, emphasizing cocktails with white port and (I think) somewhat less successful rosé port. Vinho verde is another category of Portuguese wine that a few Americans know. Certainly the low-alcohol, often bracingly acidic wines of the north coastal region are a perfect fit with summer dining. I stopped at historic Quinta da Aveleda (above), where the venerable low-end Casal Garcia brand with its blue and white lace...Read More
Atlántico knows how to salute National Lobster Day

Atlántico knows how to salute National Lobster Day

Someone, somewhere named September 25 as National Lobster Day this year, but the crustacean commemoration mostly flew under the radar. A few restaurants, however, marked the occasion. We were pretty thrilled to celebrate with the lobster bocadillo at Atlántico (600 Harrison Ave., Boston; 857-233-1898; atlanticoboston.com) in Boston's South End. This third of chef-owner Michael Serpa's restaurants focuses on the seafood traditions of Spain and Portugal. We'll vouch for that. The menu echoes much of what we've eaten in Cádiz, A Coruna, San Sebastian, or Barcelona — but with a New England twist. Tourists to Boston might argue that every day is Lobster Day. It's the dish they've been anticipating and they seem to order it with abandon. Those of us who live here indulge less...Read More
Cannonau takes its place in world of Grenache

Cannonau takes its place in world of Grenache

On February 10, Sardinia struts its stuff as it hosts the fifth annual Grenaches du Monde competition in the town of Alghero. It's the first time that Cannonau di Sardegna (the Sardinian version of Grenache) has really taken center stage in the international competitions. The most widely planted wine grape in the world, Grenache is grown extensively in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, California, and Australia. In the 2016 competition, Spanish wineries dominated the gold medals, French and Sardinian winemakers the silver, and all three countries won bronze. No other nation even placed. Someday DNA research will unravel the tangled, contentious history of the grape. Grenache was long thought to hail from the southern Rhone, where it's the backbone of Châteauneuf-du-Pape....Read More

Symington shows how port can relax

The fourth generation of the Symington clan that came to Portugal in 1882, Dominic Symington is one of a passel of cousins who run the wide-ranging port empire that includes Cockburn's, Warre's, Dow's, and Graham's, along with Quinto do Vesúvio and Altano table wines. When a group of us touring wine estates in the Douro Valley stopped in Pinhao to see the amazing tile murals at the train station (like the one above), Symington offered to pick us up for lunch – by boat. We met him at the town dock, where one of his daughters and a friend were helping him dock his small speedboat. “It's much faster than driving on the road,” he shrugged, as we sped a half hour upriver to the...Read More

Fado in a Douro vineyard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah5_nV4hhNc&w=550 The hotel at Quinta do Vallado (see last post) sits at an elevation of about 450 meters above sea level – a long way up a steep hillside from the Douro River in Portugal. But the highest vineyards, which are planted with a magical, almost mystical mix of heritage grapes (perhaps as many as 30 varieties) on vines that are close to 100 years old, are way up the hill at around 600 meters. Before we left Vallado to make our way to Quinta do Crasto, one of the staff drove us up to the top to survey the vineyards. On the way back down, around 550 meters, we saw a work crew topping the Touriga Nacional vines and tying them on wires. As...Read More

The sweet taste of the Douro

Francisco Ferreira waxed rhapsodic – and contrary to expectation. One of the original “Douro Boys,” the semi-revolutionary gang who have made Douro table wine almost better known than port in some quarters, Ferreira got a faraway look in his eyes. “I still make port because it is a fantastic product, and because, well...” He swept his arms out to gesture at the dramatic hillside, “well, we are in the Douro.” In fact, he makes vintage port (the just-declared 2011 is already spectacular) and a 20-year-old tawny. We were having dinner at Quinta do Vallado (Vilarinho dos Freires, Peso da Regua, +351 254 324326, www.quintadovallado.com), the family estate that has also been a wine tourism destination in Portugal since 2005 – all the more so since...Read More