5 reasons to put Porto on your bucket list

We have a rule for our annual girls' trip: if you're marking a birthday year that ends in "0", you get to choose the destination. My friend Lisa's desire to stay at the legendary Yeatman Hotel, and to explore the wines made upriver from there, prompted my first trip to Portugal.

What a discovery! It's perhaps shameful that a place so close to England in distance and allegiance can seem "off the beaten track", but the truth is that Portugal's profile is far lower than its more popular European neighbours. Of the handful I know who've visited, most went for the Algarve, a top British pick for beach holidays. Despite its long links to England, few are familiar with Northern Portugal and its chief city of Porto.

Here are five reasons why you should move Porto further up your holiday priority list.

ONE: IT'S EUROPE'S GREATEST WINE SECRET
Port makes it unsurprising as a wine destination. If you're English, this place's eponymous drink has probably concluded many of your life's most memorable meals. The sweet, fortified wine is made further up the Douro valley, shipped down to Porto for aging and then on to the rest of the world. The British have loved it for centuries, and political circumstance put them in charge of many of the biggest makers in the early 19th century.  Today, clever marketing departments have ensured a great port tourism experience, with the traditional port lodges on the south side of the river offering tours and tastings to meet every budget and level of interest.

But there's much more here than the sweet stuff. The Douro is one of Europe's oldest wine growing regions; their first big export market was ancient Rome. The locals even claim to be the inventors of the DOC system that restricts the ability to brand a wine according to its region. Many vineyards have vines older than a century, the starting point for fabulously rich and complex products. Steep slopes formed of easily cracked schist rock create perfect drainage while capturing the sun, while their unique terraces are spectacular to see. In fact, they whole region is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of their architectural impact on the land. Further north, you'll find some of Europe's greatest easy-drinking whites. They're all available in Porto, which has enough wine-by-the-glass offerings to keep your body in a constant, gentle pickle across your whole holiday. Best of all, most of these "table wines" (as the locals call all their non-fortified wines) are little known, rarely exported and fantastic value for money. I don't expect this state to last, so visit now to make your discoveries and invest while the price is cheap.

TWO: IT'S FAMILIAR YET EXOTIC
Portugal is a mainstream a European country that's had a continuous alliance with England since 1386 (the world's oldest). At first it all seems very familiar. Lots of churches, windy streets, picturesque architecture, sidewalk cafes. Plenty of words on signs are familiar. Most people speak English. And yet, it's not like anywhere else. The language as spoken is full of "shush"es and strange cadences, like someone mixed Spanish, Russian and some mysterious ancient texts to come up with a new dialect for a race from a fantasy novel. The architecture is as elegant as Paris or Rome, but the tiled exteriors are unlike anything I've seen elsewhere in Europe, and the churches are so encrusted with precious metals they feel almost pagan. Beautifully restored buildings sit cheek-by-jowl with crumbling ruins being reclaimed by strangling carpets of blue-blooming morning glories. This lends the city a slightly seedy decadence reminiscent of Naples or Palermo, but the locals have the sophisticated style of Milan or Madrid.

Much of the food seems familiar, yet there are oddities. Like their proud ability to cook a different salt cod recipe for every day of the year. (Why the passion with dried fish when the whole country is a narrow strip next to the aquatic larder of the Atlantic?) They outdo even Greece with their abundance of octopus recipes, and I've never visited a country more in love with the egg. It seems to dominate everything, from the custard tart that is the national pastry to fried versions lobbed atop most sandwiches. With their snack of lupin beans I discovered my first completely new food in years. The nation's history brings similar surprises. Most of us have some sense of Portugal during the Age of Discovery, their colonisation of Brazil and their role during the Napoleonic Wars. But there's so much more to discover. They have glorious heroes, romantic poets and wildly dysfunctional royals. Turns out St. Anthony of Padua ... who I was raised to respect as the most Italian of saints, and whose statue occupied all of our homes ... was Portuguese. Discovering Porto's unique take on European culture was like finding out that my favourite, long-dead author had written a series of books I somehow missed.

THREE: IT'S EASY ON THE EYES
Porto offers one of the world's greatest urban riverfronts, in duplicate. Both sides clamber up steep slopes, providing views from the opposite bank like the architectural capriccios of artists' imaginations. Stolid 18th century warehouses, Baroque fantasies encrusted with ornament, grim Romanesque piles, 19th century statements of financial confidence, modern apartment blocks all contribute to the pastiche. Harry Potter fans are delighted to discover that J.K. Rowling lived here while drafting the first book in the series. Twisting cobbled alleys, caped college students, an extravagant fountain of winged lions and an opulent neo-gothic bookstore with a sinuous, fairy-tale staircase all influenced the style of the wizarding world. The river gorge is spanned by bridges that are truly wondrous in their architectural daring; the oldest by Gustave Eiffel of Parisian tower fame. Most days dawn with ghostly fog dancing up the Douro, burning off by mid-morning. The sun sets where the river flows into the sea, painting the sky with extraordinary colours every night we were there, gilding the river and the windows of the city with the same gaudy sparkle on display in their church altars.  Head upstream, and the system of steep terraces gives you some of the most spectacular wine country on the planet. It's a dramatic, luscious, theatrical set of a place.

FOUR: NATIVES OFFER AN ABUNDANT WELCOME
If he was lying, he did it well. "We love the English!" Our driver insisted. You are our oldest allies.
Your families settled here and still run some of our biggest businesses. You rescued us from Napoleon when the Spanish betrayed us and our own royal family ran away. (The peninsular war monument topped by a bristling, confident English lion ripping the neck out of a tragically submissive French eagle leaves no room for mis-interpretation.) "You are more like our cousins than people from another country!" Whether this was true or a spectacularly fine line for the tourists, we chose to believe it. Certainly we've rarely met more uniformly cheerful, helpful and enthusiastic service. From luxury hotel to inexpensive restaurant, wine bar waiter to nun-on-the-street, it seemed that the driving ambition of everyone we met in Porto was to go out of their way to make us love their city. Nobody was ever in a hurry ... stopping to chat with us seemed more enjoyable than whatever they were off to do. Waiters were keen to offer details on the food, keener still to tell us what was best that day whether or not it was on the menu and could even be talked into offering wines by the glass from special bottles they probably shouldn't have opened.

It helps that almost everyone speaks good English. The exception, oddly, are the taxi drivers, most of whom speak only Portuguese and make it painfully obvious that Portuguese pronunciation is very different from the written word. Having your destination written down for them is a good idea, as is a strong set of nerves as they endanger their brakes and transmissions careering around precipitous, cobbled corners.  In eight days I encountered just two grumpy people. Both had tedious jobs ferrying tourists up, down and across the Douro. Otherwise, this seems a charmed place where everyone seems to love their jobs.

FIVE: GOOD VALUE FOR MONEY 
Even with a plunging pound, Porto offers bargains. Restaurants seemed to be about 20% cheaper than their London equivalents. Taxis are a bargain, rarely costing more than €10 to get from one side of town to another and about €20 to get in from the airport. If there are two or more of you, it's not worth wasting the time checking out public transport. All of the port houses charge for tastings, but it's a nominal fee compared to Northern California's wineries and the pours are generous. Reasonable wine prices prevail from Michelin-star restaurants to humble wine bars, as if the industry has colluded to encourage you to drink as much as possible. Even at the magnificently luxurious Yeatman Hotel (the catalyst for this whole trip, where rooms are a blow-the-budget extravagance) you can get wine by the glass for €4. The equivalent at a London hotel with that kind of view would be €12 or more.

Tempted yet? If not, in coming days I'll write more about wine, sightseeing, architecture, food and accommodation. Like all those cheerful Porto natives, I want you to be thinking about booking your visit before I'm finished.

Chapel Down lets English wine hold its head high

Global warming may bring drought, species extinctions and flood, but there'll be at least one upside: Excellent English wine.

There's no denying that our climate has become more like the continent's over the past decade.  Our South Downs have the same geography as some of France's great wine regions.  So why not?  The only thing missing is vines with some venerable age.  And it turns out we have that, too, as many of the vines in Chapel Down's 100 Kentish acres are older than the winery itself.  Founded in 2001, they're now the leaders in English wine production, fighting an impressive battle on both quality and PR fronts.

On the first, Chapel Down produces a variety of wines that would compare favourably with their French cousins.  Their Bacchus, a native English grape, would be indistinguishable by even most experts from a continental Sauvignon Blanc.  Their sparkling wines are directly comparable to Champagne, and their Pinot Noir reminded me of a Beaujolais.  I would be happy to serve any of these at a dinner party to wine-afficianado friends.  But Chapel Down knows that reputation may be English wine's biggest problem, so they're on the offensive.  Most impressively, they've embedded their wines in prestigious locations like The Royal Opera House, The Donmar Warehouse and Gordon Ramsay restaurants.  And their operation at headquarters sends a clear message that they're as good at this wine thing as any foreign brand.

At their main site just outside of Tenterden, they do a vineyard tour that's perhaps the most informative I've ever been on, followed by a guided tasting matching wines to local cheeses.  Our guide managed to seamlessly mix the history of wine in England (right back to the Romans) with specifics about Chapel Down, horticultural lore, insight into which grape varieties do best in England and, of course, a thorough tour of the production facilities. We learned to be wary of labels:  British wine means wine made in this country from imported fruit or juice; English wine means it's local from vine through to bottle.

Regular vineyard visitors will be intrigued by the way the vines are pruned.  The vines are allowed to grow much higher than I've seen elsewhere before their flowering stems are spread horizontally.  This creates more air flow, discouraging mildew.  (Roses are planted throughout as early warning detectors of that pernicious danger.) Blooms are only allowed to develop on the lowest line and the leaves above are pruned judiciously to allow as much sun as possible to pour onto the fruit.  Crazy English weather is still quite a variable.  Our record heat burst in July saw the quickest flowering to fruit setting in production history, but abnormally cold weather has followed since and late August brought a month's worth of rain in one day.  Who knows?  Assuming we get a long and clement autumn, all the fruit we saw will ripen and be harvested by hand; one vine roughly equates to one bottle.

Chapel Down is the giant of English production, responsible for 1/6 of the roughly six million bottles we produce each year.  Which sounds like a lot ... until you realise that the French match us with six to seven billion.  Which points to Chapel Down's biggest challenge, in my opinion.  Their wines are comparable to French offerings, but they can't match the French economies of scale.  Which means that, as impressive as our award-winning local wines are becoming, what we tasted was roughly 30% more expensive than a comparable foreign wine, and at a price point where you could get something more special for the same money.  But you're not going to be buying Chapel Down if you're making a cost-based decision.  This choice plays to novelty, patriotism and local sourcing.

The vineyard has a restaurant and an upscale farm shop to make a day of it.  The Swan serves traditional British favourites (of course) and seasonal produce; their signature dish is Yorkshire Pudding the size of a deflated football.  My crab salad starter was excellent and the roast pork solid if unremarkable.  Deserts were, sadly, disappointing, but a three-course Sunday lunch for £24.50 makes it tough to complain.  Especially when you have the novelty of local wine matching, and views over picturesque vineyards.  Modern and purpose-built, the restaurant is above the shop, with big windows taking in expansive views.  I wouldn't go out of my way for the restaurant alone, but it's an excellent conclusion to a tour and tasting.  Make sure you make reservations, however, with only 80 covers the tables here go quickly.

What we thought worth buying
Blanc de Blancs 2010 - Sparkling wine with aromas of fresh and baked apples on the nose; intense fruit characteristic of chardonnay grown on chalk soil. A special occasion bubbly on par with anything from Champagne.  £26.99

Pinot Noir 2013 - A warm and sunny growing season yielded a wine light in colour and low in tannin.  Delicate red fruit and violet on the nose; strawberry, cranberry, subtle oak and liquorice edge in on the palate.  £13.99

Nectar 2013 - We found their dessert wine to be the stand out of the day, and the one thing we tasted that was better than continental or Australian competitors.  Jasmine, rose and honeysuckle aromas with lychee and gooseberry coming in on the palate.  Pleasantly sweet but not sickly, will work as well as an aperitif as with dessert and should be stunning with foie gras.  This is going to see a lot of action at Christmas time.  £13.99 (for 50 cl)

Honorable mention must go to the English Rose 2014.  Probably the best rosé we've tasted this season but, sadly, it's for drinking now.  The Bencard cellar has enough rosé to get us to the first frost, so we had to pass on this one.

Like many of its wines, Bordeaux would have been better with a bit more time

Bordeaux has been a savvy commercial centre since Roman times.  It's a river town with an
enormous port on a wide, slow bend in the Garonne.  This Mississippi-like river snakes through Southern France, providing a watery highway linking Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Atlantic.  The Bordelais have exploited their geography by becoming pragmatic brokers and traders.  Their most famous export, of course, being wine.

This commercial heritage is reflected in an efficient tourism office, one of the best I've ever experienced for offering agendas and sorting details.  We gave them a simple mission: "We're here for a day and a half, we'd like to get an introduction to the region, but we're most interested in tasting and buying wine."  I suspect that penultimate word triggered an increased level of attention.

Of course, our first visit to Bordeaux undoubtably deserved more than 12 hours of sightseeing, and the logic of the map said we should have stopped here ... the 2/3rds point between the Normandy Coast and Gascony ... en route.  Instead, logistics forced us to squeeze it in to the two nights between the end of cooking school and the beginning of our week-long cottage rental.

The tourism office has a dedicated wine desk, unsurprisingly in what's arguably the world's largest production area for fine wines.  We quickly ended up here, where the desk manager sorted a tasting for us that afternoon, and an all-day tour the next day that would cover the city highlights before heading out to the august wine region of St. Emilion.

There are a bewildering number of places to taste wine in Bordeaux, of course, but most are introductions to the region that give a similar overview.  Compare and contrast the left and right banks, end with a Sauternes.  We'd done an excellent starter course with Berry Brothers in November (covered here), so wanted something more specific.  We were looking for interesting wines from smaller producers that didn't export much; reasonably-priced jewels we could lay down and reveal with a story at a dinner party in a few years' time.  The tourist board sent us to The Wine Corner, a small shop in a street running north from the cathedral which, we were assured, did highly personalised tastings and specialised in smaller vineyards.

Appearances deceive
Our first few minutes weren't promising.  The shop wasn't much bigger than a galley kitchen, we had to wait for other customers to clear out even though we'd made an appointment and the girl serving us was no local, but a Russian.  But all was not what it seemed.  Experts from all over the world come to this oenological Mecca to hone their skills.  She knew her stuff.  The shop front was the tip of an iceberg; when you wind down some circular stone stairs you find yourself in a warren of 18th century cellars with a cozy tasting alcove furnished with two plushly upholstered bar stools.  Our Russian spent time upstairs diagnosing our tastes and talking through possibilities.  After identifying the four we wanted to try, it was downstairs to the cellar, where she put the wines in a sensible order and walked us through the tasting notes and cellaring potential of each.

We'd opted for an organised tour the next day based on two warnings you always hear about Bordeaux.  First:  It's a huge area, and if you don't know where you're going you can spend hours driving aimlessly amongst the vines.  Second:  Few vineyards are open to walk up trade; you have to arrange tastings in advance.  There was a third tip we heard repeatedly:  Go to St. Emilion.  And so we were off, on a 25-seater mini-coach, for a short city tour followed by lunch at a St. Emilion vineyard, a drive around the AOC and a wander in the eponymous town.

The city tour was an excellent idea.  Bordeaux is not your typical provincial wine town like Beaune, Greve-in-Chianti or Napa.  It's France's 6th-largest city, with history, additional industry and government (it's the regional capital) to add to the wine.  The city centre is walkable, in theory, but the bus covered everything faster, with commentary.  The mostly 18th-century riverfront is gorgeous; the Place de la Borse and its fellows as palatial as Versailles, but built to celebrate commerce rather than monarchy.  The Alee de Tourny is a gracious rectangular space of the same period that called Piazza Navona to mind.  In fact, there's block after block of magnificent 18th century architecture that makes it clear this place was dripping with money while Paris' poor were storming the Bastille.  It's no wonder that the Girondin movement, a counter to the lead revolutionary party, was based here.  They lost, but they're commemorated in a stunning memorial column.

Other eras pop in to mix things up.  There are two city gates Eleanor of Aquitane would recognise, and though the cathedral where she contracted her marriage to Louis of France has seen several makeovers since her time, it's still resolutely gothic.  As are a whole string of impressive churches across town.  The Romans exert their presence with the ghostly remains of an amphitheater.  There's even a modern district similar to Paris' La Defense, and a Richard Rodgers-designed courthouse with funky inverted towers that mimic the Medieval tower next door.  Getting a feel for the place in a morning, or even a day, was a bit laughable.  Turns out Bordeaux has 362 official monuments historiques ... only Paris has more.  But the bus made a valiant attempt and left us with the understanding that there's plenty to see here before you even start to think about wine.

Then it was off to St. Emilion, the 30 minutes of highway driving before we saw a vineyard validating the warning about how big this place is.  The next surprise:  it's quite flat.  Every wine district I've toured relies on steep slopes, and I've accepted the general rule of thumb that the good stuff comes from high up, while the vines in the valleys yield the cheap table wine.  That's definitely not the case here, where some of the world's most expensive wines are grown in flat fields or gently rolling hills.

Our winery tour took place at Chateau Grand Corbin-Despagne, a grand cru in the northern part of the district close to the border with the equally-famous Pomerol.  The tour was standard:  start in the vineyard to discuss growth and harvest, into the room with the fermenting tanks to go over the making, finish with the barrels to talk about ageing.  The regional difference seems to be an obsessive degree of quality control.  From regular pruning of each vine to control exactly how much sun each bunch of grapes gets, to sorting the fruit grape by grape, to minutely varying the temperature of the fermenting vats as needed to moving the wines through different barrels, this is a high-intensity wine making process.  You can certainly understand why something so labour-intensive demands such a high price.  Although a sceptical voice inside of me was thinking, surely you can produce equally nice wines in other regions without all the faffing about?

The class of '85

Perhaps, but doubtless not with this sophistication and ability to age.  Over a buffet lunch we tasted four different wines, going all the way back to their 1985.  That one was a tour-de-force of complexity, giving entirely different experiences from first taste to finish and showing off why good, old wines are so treasured.  And so expensive!  These days they produce both a showcase wine and a secondary and we actually preferred the junior partner, bringing a case home to age.  It's classic Bordeaux, with light tannins, red fruits, earth and even a hint of liquorice that should mellow and deepen with laying down.

Our postprandial drive wound us through St. Emilion's extensive vineyards, dotted with historic chateaux, humble farmhouses and the mid-sized producers between them.  There's plenty of gorgeous architecture to marvel at, the landscape has enough variety to be constantly interesting, and the tour guide was a treasure trove of historical titbits about what happened, where.  One thing was certain: the whole region is doing very, very well.  Our Russian wine tasting hostess and the Chinese ads we saw for wine tours made it clear that the international super-rich are pouring in here, buying expensive labels to prove sophistication.

The top-end wineries are responding to the trend, building lavish additions, investing in their operations and producing ever more complex wines to justify the escalating prices.  Our guide, however, told us a salutary tale.  The super-rich she's been exposed to aren't interested in the nuances of taste, or the complexities of food matching.  They're ticking an acquisition box that validates their wealth.  She's had people say to her, "I've already bought and drank a €300 bottle.  Why should I buy another?  They all taste the same."  I fear that by escalating prices to take advantage of a current trend, the wine makers of Bordeaux may have a problem when the high rollers drift to the next "must have".

Our final stop was the town of St. Emilion itself, which ended the day on a sour note.  I suspect this is one of these places like Taormina or San Gimignano that transforms back into a picturesque stage set at night, after the group tours leave.  But in the middle of the day, with every street body-to-body with tourists, it's horrible.  The Medieval ruins, stately towers and giddily-angled streets fade beneath the braying hordes.  Few seem to have any interest in what's around them.  They're eating ice cream, browsing through tacky, wine-themed gift shops or stopping to block traffic as they debate where to go next.  In a square at the heart of town, a busker "entertains" in a voice so irritating we thought he must be asking for money to stop. We found the whole place charmless and irritating, and were happy to have so little time there.

Fortunately, there was one redeeming feature.  The monolithic church is worth pushing past the crowds to see.  A local nobleman returned from the first crusade so impressed by the church of the Holy Sepulchre that he decided to create his own version in St. Emilion, hewing a Romanesque church out of the living rock to house the bones of the monk who gave name to the place.  It's an other-worldly, subterranean wonder, unlike anything I've ever seen.  It's more like a Game of Thrones set than a recognisable piece of European history, even with the modern incursion of the metal struts necessary on some of the columns to keep the whole thing from collapsing.  And, best of all, access is limited and only by ticketed, guided tour.  Meaning it's the only place in St. Emilion where you can find space to breathe, while being with people who appreciate their surroundings.

We packed an enormous amount into a day and a half, found plenty to enjoy and bought several cases of treasure for the wine fridges.  But, bottom line, we like Burgundy more.  From the sightseeing to the vineyards to the style of wine, the other famous wine region touches our heart a bit more.  Bordeaux, doubtlessly, deserves more time to prove us wrong.  But we had to go.  A cottage back in the sleepy Gascon countryside was calling.