CLUBHOUSE | LIQUID ASSETS
MAKING THEIR MARK
PORTUGUESE WINES ARE MOVING UP IN THE WORLD. ROBIN LYNAM SELECTS HIS FAVOURITES – AND ADVISES WHERE BEST TO ENJOY THEM.
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ntil quite recently the international perception The Clube Militar de Macau, home of an array of Portuguese wines was that, port excepted, of fine, moderately priced Portuguese wine fundamentally they weren’t serious. The best known were white Vinho Verde, a refreshing, quaffable, but far from complex wine from the Minho region (red Vinho Verde is also made but is, as Hugh Johnson delicately puts it, “an acquired taste”), and Mateus Rosé, a sweet, unsophisticated blush wine, launched in the 1940s. At one point Mateus Rosé accounted for 40 per cent of Portuguese wine exports, and it did for the image of the rest of Portugal’s wines what Blue Nun Liebfraumilch did for Germany’s. Times, fortunately, have changed. True, the Portuguese economy is in state of crisis, the full implications of which for the country’s many wineries are as yet unclear, but in recent years the production of serious wines there has gone from strength to strength. The Douro Valley – already well established as the port Alentejo has also emerged as a producer production region – has emerged, alongside Alentejo, as an important red wine of both reds and whites of increasingly high district, and also as a producer of white wines of both minerality and depth. quality, the latter often blends dominated by the Now port producers are also making good quality table wines. Dirk Niepoort, the fifth generation head of the still family-owned Niepoort Antao Vaz grape. It is no longer necessary to go to Macau port house, began diversification into non fortified still wines in the early 1990s. He made his first dry red in 1990, and a dry white for the first time in to source Portuguese wines, although you 1993. In 1996 Michael Broadbent, Master of Wine and an influential British wine won’t find many on the shelves at Watson’s authority, described Niepoort as “the Latour of Portugal”. Its wines, however, remain Wine Cellar. Importers in Hong Kong include Adega Royale (adegaroyale.com) and Global much more affordable than Bordeaux of equivalent quality. For both port and non-fortified red wines Touriga Nacional is the Douro’s signature Wine Cellar (gwcellar.com). Most Portuguese wines, particularly the reds, grape, but Niepoort believes that cultivating different grape varieties together in the same vineyard produces an extra dimension in the wines, absent from single varietal taste best with food, and unsurprisingly it tends to be Portuguese or Macanese restaurants that have plantings. The practice is a traditional one in the Douro Valley. So is crushing grapes by the old fashioned treading method, using shallow tanks the most extensive lists. Again you don’t have to go to Macau, although which in Portugal are called “lageres”. Around 60 per cent of Niepoort’s grapes are still there is much to be said for doing so. There crushed this way. The house’s white wines have both acidity and minerality with attractive fresh is a good list at the Casa Lisboa Portuguese fruit aromas, and are altogether more serious whites than most people would expect Restaurant and Bar on the eighth floor of the Lan Kwai Fong Tower in Central, with a particularly from Portugal – fine examples of the new generation of Douro wines. The reds are elegant and peppery, with fine, well resolved tannins, and a silkiness strong representation from the Douro. If you are going to Macau, however, there are that recalls their fortified cousins, but at much lower levels of alcohol. In 2003 Niepoort was among the founder members of an informal alliance a number of restaurants with strong Portuguese of high quality Douro wine producers, which also includes Quinta Do Vallado, Quinta wine lists. These include The Clube Militar Do Vale D Maria, Quinta Do Vale Meao, and Quinta Do Crasto. Collectively they call (clubemilitardemacau.net), which is among the themselves, lightheartedly, “The Douro Boys” and their wines (and ports) are available more moderately priced of the town’s Portuguese restaurants, the pricier Litoral (restaurante-litoral. in both Hong Kong and Macau. Other names to look out for among leading producers of non-fortified Douro reds com) and the more rustic and unfailingly friendly Antonio on Taipa (antoniomacau.com). include Barca Velha and Quinta do Cotto.
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HK GOLFER・AUG 2013
HKGOLFER.COM