Portuguese Wine

The quality available for such inexpensive rates is a surprise for a lot of travelers. When they go back home, they begin buying more Portuguese wine. Portugal is the leader in white wine consumption per capita worldwide. We consume a great deal of white wine! However it is not just the Portuguese, its also the visitors.

I have actually seen a significant enhancement in the design of white wine and in wine making. There is a younger generation of winemakers now who take a trip outside of Portugal, who taste white wines from around the world, and compare their white wines with their peers.

Ahead of time, winemakers never left their areas. Twenty years earlier, most wineries were making red wines for the domestic market. Now they are making white wines that are easier to value for global customers less familiar with Portugal. We have a huge series of grape ranges and a similarly big variety of grape growing terroirs.

Our objective is to have all of Portugal's wineries certified in our program and actually be leaders in this domain. With Portuguese wine, you get more than you spend for. More helpful hints can taste this in our 15 dollar red wine, however it is equally true of our 50 dollar white wines. The value is there at every quality level.

Portuguese Green Wine

After our chat, I invested some time tasting through a wide variety of red wines and Frederico Falco's words proved out. At every rate point and in every wine style, I found fresh, well balanced red wines that are certainly in tune with a global palate. The wines photographed above are just a small sampling of favourites from the tasting.

Wine and travel seem to be one nowadays - every bottle tells a tale. And you can travel Portugal by the red wine areas ... Centuries of financial isolation avoided trade with other wine-producing countries such as Spain and France, so Portuguese growers focused on their own grape ranges. Portugal has well over 200 indigenous grapes, just a few of which have actually travelled anywhere else worldwide.

Grape growing on this land continued for centuries, and the grapes themselves evolved over the generations. By 1756, the very first designated wine-producing area on the planet was demarcated in the Douro Valley. The co-operative created the first mandatory historic production standards and quality regulations for the area's white wines. The Port white wines produced there eventually became famous, coveted the world over.

Visitors to Portugal are well-rewarded with a hands-on view of modern-day white wine trade soaked in history; the Douro Valley in Northern Portugal is probably the last of the world's significant red wine regions still to be pressing substantial amounts of its grapes by foot - in shallow, open wine-fermenters, called lagares.