Vidi, Vidi, Verdi

Tour to the Douro valley where the grapes are famous for making great port and excellent vino verde. Ella and I aren’t the tour type of travelers. Groups make it difficult to wander off, my specialty. Sitting in vans for long stretches of time while a guide tries to feed us fascinating facts becomes tedious real quickly. But to visit the quintas and taste their vintages requires a guide to get entry.

So away we went with Paulo. He picked us up before eight and twisted his way through Porto picking up the other six tourists (four Portuguese and a young American couple from Minneapolis). He hit the highway out of town and drew our attention to green things left and right. There’s a valley of gently sloping hills with stands of eucalyptus trees; there’s a valley with a vineyard laid out in rows of short ropy vines in the shape of gnarled black cemetery crosses shrouded by a garland of green; there’s a valley with hills divided into green squares by silvery olive trees which the Romans introduced as a way of providing permanent boundary markers.

We stopped in the smattering of tumbledown houses that made up the town of Sabrosa and examined a farmer spraying his vines. The village had a street called Rua de BBKing. BB played a number of gigs there. Paulo conjectured that he was drawn to this tiny village by the excellence of the Douro Valley wine.

Then there was a stop at the bottom of a green valley so we could take a boat trip up and down the Douro River. This is the second day in a row that we’ve cruised the Douro. Preceding my incarnation as a medieval monk, I’m convinced that if I was in the green green hills of Portugal, it wasn’t as a sailor, or fisherman. Huck can have his raft, languorous river rides lull, then stupefy. My preferred memory has me as a Roman legionnaire helping engineer a pathway through the forests of Europe with the prospects of wild boar and even wilder Goths keeping me on my toes.

It was a great relief to finally tour the stone warehouses storing the port made from last September’s grapes. The musty, faintly sour smell emanating from the enormous French oak barrels was a heady reminder of rollicking medieval intoxication. We went to two quintas specializing in port. Both our guides at Kopke and Quinta de Marrocos were slender young men at ease with our group which had grown with the addition of another tour.

At each quinta we were given two glasses of port, one white, one red. I wasn’t drinking any, so Ella got to enjoy four glasses at both stops. And Ella lived happily ever after.

Back when I was living on the Zuni Indian Reservation, a friend dropped by from Fort Defiance and we demolished a jug of cheap Tawney Port I had bought at Kelly’s. The next day I woke up with a hangover I’ll never forget. My brain felt like it had turned to a fragile, throbbing matrix of sugar, a Faberge egg that kept shattering from searing flashes which momentarily blinded me then turned into painful crystal shards that slowly melted into a visual sweat. I’ve never had a sip of port since.