My recent days in Lisbon included spending time with a friend I hadn’t seen in person in a long while. And then, somehow, vinho verde (“green/young wine”) became the drink of choice over conversation. I liked the spontaneous way vinho verde became part of the trip, because it was the common thread between visits with different people. An accidental mnemonic. (Maybe I should use wine to help me remember Portuguese words.)
My wine education has expanded simply by living in a wine-producing country, but at an exceptionally slow rate because I drink mostly water and coffee. Typically the only wine on hand at Casa Aguiar is for cooking. I’d been dabbling in vinho verde since I arrived, but on rare occasions, such as an accompaniment to leitão or when we had visitors and wanted to introduce them to this distinctly Portuguese wine.
Monday was a holiday in Portugal, but I was still able to buy wine1 — my contribution towards dinner — and chose one I didn’t know, a bottle of Muros Antigos vinho verde. The shop where I bought it had several shelves of vinho verde, and since I was in a hurry, I made a selection based purely on the Portuguese grape: Alvarinho. The next morning I took a photo with my phone, put it on Instagram, and it sparked an exchange which you can read in the comments section. Like I said, my wine education is expanding…
I bought this vinho verde in Lisbon to take to a dinner simply because it's from the Alvarinho grape variety (grown only in Monção and Melgaço). It did not disappoint. Far from; it may have singularly converted me from a summer cider drinker to a summer vinho verde drinker. #PortugueseWine
A photo posted by Gail at Large (@gailatlarge) on Aug 18, 2016 at 4:43pm PDT
August 14, 2016
Album: Lisbon 2016
- This would be next to impossible in Canada, where the government has a steel grip on the sales of alcohol, except maybe in Québec. ↩
