Porto Day Trip

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We took a day trip this Saturday to visit Porto, the second biggest city in Portugal, and the home of port wine. Porto is on the coast and is a 1-hour train ride north of Coimbra.

The most popular attractions in Porto are the port wine lodges which are actually across the Douro river in the city of Vila Nova de Gaia. The port wine lodges have been used as warehouses for port aging, storage, and shipping since the mid 18th century. These days most companies have updated their warehouses with tasting rooms and tours. Visiting here was almost like going to Napa or Sonoma (or other wine regions), but all of the lodges are really close together so it’s pretty easy to walk between them.

We went to three lodges: a tour and tasting at Ferreira, a tasting at Ramos Pinto, and a museum at Sandeman’s. We had fun at all of the lodges, but our favorite part of the day was the tasting at Ramos Pinto. They had a nice casual lounge area and 5 different generously poured ports to try. We had a dry white port (we didn’t know white port existed until we got to Portugal), a sweet white port, two “tawnys”, and a ruby port. The tawny and ruby ports are both red and tasted pretty similar to us, but the tawnys we had were a little less sweet than the ruby.

After all of the port tastings, we felt we needed to make up for it by going to the cathedral on the hill back across the river in Porto . There was a wedding going on at the cathedral, so we didn’t end up going inside, but maybe we’ll do that next time.

- Jason

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