Tonight’s tasting
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off any wine tasted

We are delighted to have Ryan Opaz at the shop, co-author (with Simon Woolf) of “Foot Trodden: Portugal and the Wines that Time Forgot” for a book signing and tasting of five unique Portuguese wines to spark conversation. Ryan’s book provides a concise, analytical, and up-to-date picture of the Portuguese wine cosmos, with an important introduction that sets the stage, quite sobering, for the small group of growers who are beginning to emerge from a crushing history of the authoritarian state monopoly over large-scale co-op production, conjoined with abject economic underdevelopment. Given the backdrop of a state-controlled mandate to produce uniform bulk commodity wines during the Salazar years, it is exciting to now see the emergence of beautifully wrought small-scale Portuguese wines, and discover an array of unique, traditional regional varieties vinified in an honest, non-Parkerized fashion. In the wine trade, we sometimes use the ugly term “useful” to describe Portuguese wine; you know, the category of inexpensive bottles of which the primary value proposition is price. The wines we are tasting are not “useful,” and it is difficult to ascribe an instrumental value to them, other than you really want to put them in your mouth. In Ryan’s book you will find fine-grain details about the two small-scale winegrowers who made the wines we will taste: Vasco Croft and António Madeira.

At any given time, you will find one or more of Croft’s Aphros wines on our shelves. Croft is a Steinerian (biodynamics) true believer, and I want to know more about how he can fight the despoliations wrought by mildew in his humid region without resorting to conventional fungicides. We are tasting two of Croft’s wines: starting the tasting with his high-energy, sea-salty pét-nat, 50/50 arinto and loureiro and finishing the tasting with his alvarelhão. Alvarelhão is intriguing. It is a grape in rapid decline due to the vagaries of consumer preference, but as you will see it is also a grape that in the right hands deserves a new audience. The grape was once widely employed in Port production and for dry table wines but has dramatically fallen out of favor in recent years, declining to just a handful of acres by 2010. Croft’s vivacious, light, and mineral alvarelhão ferments in granite tanks and ages in stainless vats and is only 11 percent alcohol.

We are also tasting wines from another grower we are smitten with at the shop: António Madeira. His family was part of the Portuguese diaspora who, fleeing Salazar’s authoritarian state migrated to France. Raised in Paris and trained as an engineer, Madeira has now returned to his ancestral Dão where he is quietly making some of the most exciting wines of his generation. He is a conservator of old vines and vineyards, and all three of the Madeira’s wines we are tasting each incorporate many different antique grape varieties, including his Pahlete, a promiscuous field blend of over forty grape varieties, both red and white, some well-known, some just hanging on by a thread.