Winemaker Notes
A good accompaniment to hunting birds (such as pheasant, quail or partridge), red meat (game or deer), grilled or roasted meat and aged, hard cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Initial new wood flavors show the youth of this complex wine. Then it fills out in the mouth with an explosive blackberry flavor and dense fruit tannins. With its power and flavor intensity, it has firm potential to age over at least five years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
This wine is mostly Baga, supplies the extra concentration and structure that the regular Tinto reviewed this issue lacked, but otherwise shares its sensibilities, demonstrating fine balance, with every hair in place, and enough subtle power to support the wine and give it some vibrancy. It is a very civilized view of Baga, laid back and restrained, yet with very fine persistence.
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Wine & Spirits
From a six-acre block of vines planted in 1940, this is the most tannic and compressed of the three Foz de Arouce wines we tasted; it not only requires the most cellar time, but also is the most likely to reward long aging. For now, it carries a heavy baga weight in the tannins, yielding hints of rose perfume, fragrant stemminess and plump red fruit. Built to cellar.
This dark-skinned, Portugese variety creates powerful red wines with great color, structure and finesse and is specially prominent in the Bairrada and Dão regions. Somm Secret—Because of its ample acidity and striking color, Baga also makes a great rosé; much of it from the Bairrada ends up in this style.
Best known for intense, impressive and age-worthy fortified wines, Portugal relies almost exclusively on its many indigenous grape varieties. Bordering Spain to its north and east, and the Atlantic Ocean on its west and south coasts, this is a land where tradition reigns supreme, due to its relative geographical and, for much of the 20th century, political isolation. A long and narrow but small country, Portugal claims considerable diversity in climate and wine styles, with milder weather in the north and significantly more rainfall near the coast.
While Port (named after its city of Oporto on the Atlantic Coast at the end of the Douro Valley), made Portugal famous, Portugal is also an excellent source of dry red and white Portuguese wines of various styles.
The Douro Valley produces full-bodied and concentrated dry red Portuguese wines made from the same set of grape varieties used for Port, which include Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz (Spain’s Tempranillo), Touriga Franca, Tinta Barroca and Tinto Cão, among a long list of others in minor proportions.
Other dry Portuguese wines include the tart, slightly effervescent Vinho Verde white wine, made in the north, and the bright, elegant reds and whites of the Dão as well as the bold, and fruit-driven reds and whites of the southern, Alentejo.
The nation’s other important fortified wine, Madeira, is produced on the eponymous island off the North African coast.