portocityguide.com

Welcome to Portocityguide.com! Here you will find an insider's guide to all things Porto -- plus tips on what to visit in the Douro wine region and Northern Portugal more generally. Our goal is to be the most comprehensive, selective, reliable, and independent source of online information on what Porto has to offer! If you enjoy what you find here, you may want to consider subscribing to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Vinologia (vee-noo-loo-GEE-ah) is the best port-only wine bar in Porto — it matches the Solar do Vinho do Porto in terms of variety and beats it in terms of the enthusiasm and service. (OK, it is not as comfortable, but it makes up in liveliness what it lacks in plush.) Roy Hersh, an American wine critic who has covered port for a long time, has this to say: “If this was near my home, I’d be broke and homeless.” Owner Jean Philippe Duhard, originally from Bordeaux, settled in Porto in 1995 and became enamored of port wine. Five years later he opened this place, and has been doing all of us a favor ever since.

Located at the heart of the Ribeira neighborhood, Vinologia (a.k.a. La Maison des Porto — or the house of port in Jean Philippe’s native French) occupies an authentic eighteenth-century house. In it, you’ll find a tiny wine bar (25 guests max. at any time) as well as an excellent wine store devoted entirely to port. The decor is sober, mostly in brick, granite, and wood. Every nook and cranny in the place is filled with port bottles, port glassware, port books — all things port. Their slogan is “A glass of port, in the heart of Porto.”

As the name indicates — it stands for “wine-ology,” or the science of wine — the team at Vinologia takes their job pretty darn seriously. In fact, they don’t conceive of the place as a bar, more of a port wine school. And they’re well equipped to do so. Jean Philippe is a member of the Port Wine Institute’s confraria (brotherhood), an exclusive club to which only the most well-versed in port can aspire to belong. His son Gustavo possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of port, including minor producers and off vintages. And Cristophe, the Swiss bartender, is fluent in a handful of languages, making their mission of converting heathens into port-believers much easier. As you probably guess by now, service is attentive and enthusiastic.

Vinologia offers more than two hundred bottlings of port, which easily makes it the place with the widest variety of port in Porto. While the Solar do Vinho do Porto covers mostly the main producers, Vinologia specializes in small producers who rarely make it to the U.S. market. If you know little about port, this is a great place to catch the bug. If you already know a bit and would like to know more, then this is the place to develop a nuanced knowledge of the world of port and a real grasp of its intricacies.

You can try port by the glass, or you can go for one (or more…) of the flights on offer, from basic introductory stuff to top-notch wines. The prices are easy to follow — each wine of the same kind (dry white, ruby, tawny, 10-year old, 20-year old, 40-year old, LBV, vintage, colheita, etc.) has the same price. Whites are served with apricots and salted toasted almonds; rubies with prunes; and tawnies with chocolates and raisins. If you’re hungrier than that, Vinologia offers raisin bread, chocolate, nuts, and the king of Portuguese cheeses — Serra da Estrela (SEH-rah dah Esh-TREH-lah) — a raw sheep’s-milk cheese that makes a perfect accompaniment for port and is one of the best cheeses in the whole world.

In sum, Vinologia is an excellent spot for several stops during your stay in Porto. Take a break during the day and taste a three-glass flight. Go there after dinner and indulge in a longer tasting. If you’re staying at the Porto Pestana Carlton (our favorite hotel in town), the walk home is only one block downhill. Enjoy, and Godspeed!

Price point: ports by the glass from 1.5 euros; degustation flights from 6 euros. Prices in general are very reasonable for the quality of the ports served. Bottles of port are 10 euros and up.

Address: Rua S. Joao 46, Porto.

Website: http://www.lamaisondesporto.com/

Opening hours: open daily from 2:00pm till midnight.

Reservations: required only for groups of 10 or more; call (+351) 93.605.7340.

Getting there: if you are driving from downtown Porto, the easiest way of getting there is to take Rua Mouzinho da Silveira down to Praca do Infante. Park there in the underground parking lot. Once you’ve walked back up to the street level, face the river (which means turn your back to the red metal structure on the higher side of the square, the Mercado Ferreira Borges, an old market). Then walk to the lowest part of the square, and turn left. Vinologia is on the next crossing, at the beginning of the block that leads to the tunnel heading to the D. Luiz I bridge. If you’re not driving, walking from downtown should take you 10-15 minutes, and a taxi should take about 5 minutes.

The Solar do Vinho do Porto (So-LAR doo VEE-gno doo POR-too) is — on a par with Vinologia — one of our favorite places to enjoy port wine. It is a comfortable bar operated by the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto (Port and Douro wines Institute), the state agency that regulates the port wine industry. This means two things. First, on the upside, it is one of the very few places where service is both deeply knowledgeable on port and absolutely unbiased about which producers are best. Second, on the downside, it is not an “in” place; rather a quiet, old-fashioned wine bar where you focus on the wine. We think the pros more than compensate for the cons. Besides, the bar is installed right next to the Museum of Romanticism, in a lovely XIX century mansion perched on a slope overlooking the river — and there is outdoors seating when the weather is nice.

The Solar do Vinho do Porto has the widest and most consistently good selection of port available in town. Moreover, it has excellent selection for all price points, from no-frills tawnies and rubies to four-digit vintages and colheitas. Since it attracts many people willing to try out port and know a bit more about it, there’s always a good number of vintages and LBVs waiting to be poured any given day (these wines have to be consumed within a few days of opening the bottle, so that most places don’t have many choices at any given time).

The staff consists on the most knowledgeable port sommeliers you will ever find. These are the same people that judge wines in the mandatory blind tastings by an official state-appointed panel that precedes any decision on the part of producers to decide what to label (and how much to price) their port wine.

If you didn’t know, it’s not up to the producers to decide, for instance, what gets labeled a vintage, or an LBV (late bottled vintage), or a 10-year old blend. Producers submit to the Institute samples prepared by their in-house wine makers. The Institute organizes a blind tasting of those samples by a panel of experts and, based on the panel’s recommendation, issues a binding decision on whether the producer can indeed turn the wine in question into, say, a vintage, or whether it must settle for the less prestigious LBV label.

Contrary to what happens in the port wine cellars across the river (and in wineries around the world), the sommeliers here have no vested interest in pushing any particular brand on you. In fact, they have themselves selected the wines on offer at the Solar do Vinho do Porto. The process works as follows. Every year, port wine producers are invited to submit up to five wines for consideration to the Institute. These are tasted blindly, according to each category (ruby, tawny, 10-year old, 20-year old, 40-year old, LBV, vintage, colheita, etc.) and divided into price ranges. The tasting panel then selects up to three wines from each brand to sell at the Solar do Vinho do Porto. They are offered by the glass and also for sale, so you can satisfy your wine-shopping needs here too.

Besides port wine, the Solar do Vinho do Porto has very little on offer — as it should be. There is mineral water, a few options for kids, crackers to cleanse the palate between tastings, and an excellent Serra da Estrela, the king of Portuguese cheeses, served in two varieties — hard and soft.

The decor is a bit dated, but everything from the lighting to the sofas is very comfortable. The small garden is delightful and the view is excellent, extending from the port wine cellars to the river mouth.

Whenever we have foreign friends in town and want to introduce them to port wine, we head to the Solar do Vinho do Porto after dinner and ask the somellier to pick a good choice for one of each of the following: a ruby, an LBV, and a vintage (all wines aged in the bottle); plus a tawny, a 10-year old, a 20-year old, a 40-year old, and a good colheita, like a Krohn from the fifties or sixties, when they had were several good years (all wines aged in wooden casks). We place all he glasses on the table in two rows — ruby-type and tawny-type wines. Then we start with the least expensive ruby and pass the glass around, working our way up to the vintage. We pause for a bit and do the same with the tawny flight, workng our way up to the colheita. Then, if you want to punish yourself a bit, ask for a second glass of the cheaper wines and see how they suddenly seem much worse than they did before you tried out the better wines.

Price point: port wines by the glass 3 euros and up; 10 euros and up by the bottle.

Address: Quinta da Macieirinha - Rua de Entre Quintas 220, Porto.

Website: http://www.ivp.pt/

Opening hours: Monday through Thursday, 2:00pm to 8:00pm; Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm to midnight. Closed on Sundays and public holidays.

Reservations: not needed; call (+351) 22.609.4749.

Getting there: getting to the Solar do Vinho do Porto is tricky by car; getting back after a few glasses of port is even trickier, so we strongly recommend taking a taxi there. The staff will be glad to call a taxi for you on your way out — or you can climb the very steep street as a way of working all that port out of your system. Note that although there are signs point toward the Solar on the main streets, the way there is through narrow winding streets more appropriate for medieval ox carts than to twenty-first century highway drivers. If, however, you insist on driving, it should be easy to park the car right outside the Solar. From downtown Porto, go up Rua de Ceuta. Enter the tunnel, from which you will exit on the last exit, towards Rua D. Manuel II. Follow the street until you see a large gated garden on your left. Continue going down slowly, trying to get to the left lane. As the street ends you’ll see a bowl-upside-down shaped building on your left, inside the gated garden (it is the Palacio de Cristal, an exhibition center). Most of the traffic will turn right at the end of the street. Don’t follow them. Stop on the traffic light on the center of the street — your left lane — and when possible start going down the narrow cobbled stone street that is very slightly to your left — Rua de Vilar. Once in Rua de Vilar (cobbled stone), turn on the first street that will appear to your left. This is the very narrow Rua de Entre Quintas and after a few turns it starts going steeply down the slope. Just follow the street to the end — it has no way out. It literally ends at the gate of the Museum of Romanticism, through which you gain access to the Solar. Go through the gates and park right there. The Solar is to your left when you are facing the Museum house. If you’re not driving, a taxi should take 15 minutes from downtown.

Degusto (deh-GOOSH-too) is one of our favorite restaurants in Porto. It features a contemporary decor, excellent service, great food, and the longest wine list in town, including around forty wines by the glass. (The wine list reflects what’s on offer at Vinho e Coisas, the co-owned wine store next door.)

The menu is best described as a blend of Portuguese traditional cuisine with some Italian-inspired dishes. If you can arrive early, have a glass of wine at the bar and try the many amuse gueule available. Appetizers include an excellent red wine risotto with goat cheese, a local salad of codfish tongues with roquefort, as well as excellent selections of Portuguese cheeses and smoked meats from the Tras-os-montes inland region. Among the entrees, try the risotto with berberechos ramon pena (a type of short-neck clam from Galicia, the region of Spain to the north of Portugal), seasoned with fresh cilantro; the octopus gnocchi with prosciutto and small padron peppers; or the pheasant stuffed with fava beans and farinheira (a smoked sausage made with pork and flour). For those who want to try a truly Portuguese specialty, go for the arroz de pica no chao em cabidela, a traditional way of preparing chicken with rice, cooked in the bird’s blood and vinegar. Believe us, it’s much better than it sounds. End with a slice of Serra da Estrela, the king of Portuguese cheeses, accompanied by some jam.

Service is knowledgeable and helpful, so don’t hesitate to ask for advice on obscure Portuguese wines. If you like any in particular (or all…) head next door and buy them at Vinho e Coisas.

Price point: expect to spend 30 euros plus drinks. Nine-course degustation menu for 45 euros.

Address: Rua Sousa Aroso 540-544, Matosinhos.

Website: http://www.vinhoecoisas.pt/

Opening hours: lunch (12:30 to 3:00pm) Tuesday to Saturday; dinner (7:30pm to midnight) Monday to Saturday. The wine bar section is open Tuesday to Saturday between 6:00pm and midnight.

Reservations: recommended; call (+351) 22.936.4363.

Getting there: easy access by car; otherwise take a taxi. If you’re driving from downtown Porto, take Avenida da Boavista all the way to the sea. Turn right and cross the city park, with the sea on your left. Go around a roundabout and stay straight to enter Rua Brito Capelo. On the first traffic light, turn right to Rua Sousa Aroso. Degusto is on your right a few blocks up the street. If you’re not driving, take a taxi (30-40 minutes from downtown).