Why Portuguese white wine is the taste of summer
The fashionable new summery white wine source is Portugal, which is not just home to spritzy vinho verde but fine dry white burgundy taste-alikes with thrillingly high acidity, original flavours and a wonderful whack of steely minerality. Their tongue-tingling intensity often reminds me of top-notch chablis, making these whites the perfect partner to seafood. Other toasty, oak-fermented and aged Portuguese whites have more than a dash of the Côte d’Or about them.
Thirty years ago Portugal's white wines were mostly rustic offerings, only made to give producers something to drink before the main red event. Yet Portugal always had heaps of white wine potential in the shape of hundreds of different indigenous white grapes, some great mountain vineyards and granite soil, plus the tempering influence