Port Wine Lodges

The port wine lodges line the Cais de Gaia waterfront for nearly a kilometre — a continuous row of terracotta-tiled warehouses stacked up the hillside behind the quay, each one holding hundreds of oak casks in various stages of ageing. The names painted on the rooftops in large white letters are one of the great sights of the Porto riverfront, best appreciated from the far bank.

Almost all the major lodges — Taylor's, Graham's, Ramos Pinto, Sandeman, and more than a dozen others — offer guided tours and tastings. The tours are excellent value for money: typically an hour walking through the cellars among barrels stacked to the ceiling, learning the difference between tawny and ruby port, late bottled vintage and vintage, and ending with a tasting of two or three wines. Tawny ports aged for ten, twenty, or forty years are the most distinctive products of the Gaia lodges; they develop a complexity and nuttiness that sets them entirely apart from the cheap red ports sold as a mixer.

Taylor's Fladgate, on the hill above the quay, is one of the best operations: serious about the history, generous with the pouring, and with a terrace that has one of the best views of Porto in the city. Graham's has a similarly impressive operation. Both require advance booking in high season. If you visit just one, Taylor's is the recommendation.

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A story
The port wine lodges moved to Gaia from the Douro Valley in the eighteenth century, when British merchants based in Porto discovered that the climate on the coastal side of the hills was better for ageing wine than the harsh interior. The name "lodge" — from the Portuguese "loja" — distinguishes these warehouses from the quintas where the grapes are grown. The Treaty of Windsor, then the Methuen Treaty of 1703, gave British merchants preferential access to Portuguese wine markets, and British family names have dominated the Gaia skyline ever since: Taylor Fladgate, Graham, Sandeman, Cockburn, Dow, Fonseca.