As I continue slowly catching up on finishing the *many* review drafts of places I visited in our…read morewhirlwind tour of Portugal in January, in this case one of a whole bunch of port-focused wineries within convenient walking distance of each other, that obviously being why I chose to stay at an airbnb on this side of the bridge, so I could visit as many of them as possible.
Funny enough, at first glance, this tasting room felt *very* corporate - there's tons of space to spread out, but the overall vibe of the place was something like "museum gift shop". You can tell the receptionist is just a receptionist and has nothing to do with the wine's creation, which isn't inherently bad, it just sets a different tone than some of the *smallest* port tasting rooms.
That said, their prices were extremely reasonable pretty much all across the board, including a base flight for 12.50 euros that had multiple standouts for the trip, enough so that this was the only tasting room where I went back a couple days later and self-constructed a second 20 euro flight that included a couple of their more somewhat more bottles. Though, funny enough, it was mostly their cheapest bottles that impressed me the most in their complexity of flavor - their tawny reserve, the Lagrima das Damas, the Lacrimosas, the base (slightly less sweet) white, and one truly interesting bottle, a Vinho Quinado, effectively a tawny port turned into an amaro with quinine and other botanicals, which as a cocktail nerd, obviously I loved learning about and trying. They *have* plenty of very expensive bottles, but the ones I mentioned were, as of when I visited a couple months ago, just *ludicrously* well-priced for how good they were. (I bought the most bottles here of anywhere I went, 3 including the Vinho Quinado - and would definitely have bought a couple more, if luggage weight hadn't been such a consideration.) I totally wasn't expecting to love their cheapest bottles, honestly, more than some of the much pricier ones I tried, here and elsewhere.