September 8, 2023 Wine Tasting at Casa Lata, Terrmas de Caldelas, Dinner - A Rival, Fera Nova, Portugal

September 8, 2023 Wine Tasting at Casa Lata, Terrmas de Caldelas, Dinner - A Rival, Fera Nova, Portugal

What a difference a day makes.

We decided to relax and reduce our driving to cover as much ground as we did yesterday and it worked perfectly. We saw more, did more, and had a much better time.

We ate breakfast at 9:30 and today were offered scrambled eggs in addition to all the other items. I drank orange juice and then hot tea with a small roll and a lovely small croissant on which I spread the fabulous cherry preserves. Then I ate eggs with a slice of ham and cheese and finally ate a slice of the lemon cake Suzette raved about.

Suzette ate the same things with coffee and heated milk.

We then walked in the vineyard to look at the grapes and found that many bunches were beginning to turn brown. We tasted a few of the mature grapes that were just starting to turn yellow and translucent and they tasted sweet and lovely, but the skins on the grapes were rather thick and I spit them out.

We then returned to our room and watched CNN for a few minutes and read and I dozed off twice until 1:30 when we drove the six miles to Casa Lata Winery, where the ladies at our winery made us a reservation for a tasting in English.

We waited until 2:00 for the tasting until the young lady welcomed some guests from England who were staying at the Winery.  Many of the larger wineries have tourist rooms.  As we learned during the tasting later, in the late 1990’s the EU made funds available to improve facilities at wineries to accommodate guests in an effort to encourage eno-tourism and wine making.

Casa Lata was a perfect example of the success of the EU program. The lady who guided us was the daughter and niece of the owners of the winery, who all still live at the winery. The uncle who owned the property and had no children was raising milk cows and producing milk. He turned management of the property over to his nephew, who decided to plant grapes and produce wine with the EU’s economic assistance.  

The nephew, the lady’s father, decided to grow the indigenous local grape varieties, which we had never heard of or tasted until today.

We started by looking at the large garden with three types of tomatoes, two types of beans, corn, several leafy vegetables and a small herb garden and said hello to the lady who has tended the food garden for many years.

We then went into the production facility. Casa Lata does all of it own de-stemming, crushing, fermentation of approximately 600,000 liters of wine per year, and bottling at the rate of about 6000 bottles per day. No wine is wood aged and a large portion of the wine is put into what appeared to be five liter plastic barrels, rather than bottled, and sold to local restaurants that put the wine into steel barrels, like beer barrels in the US, and served as house wine in the course of the year following production.

The daughter explained that there is no waste of any part of the grapes.

After the grapes are crushed and the juice separated from the must, the must is sold to companies that make brandy. Then after fermentation and micro filtering the wine to remove any cloudiness the residue is put back on the fields to enrich the soil.

After visiting the production warehouse we followed the daughter to a tasting room that used to be a machine shop and warehouse, before the transition and we tasted five wines.

The first wine was a white wine made from 100% loreido grapes, then we tried a rose made from a different grape, then a red served cold in a ceramic bowl, then we tried a blend of 40% Arinto and 60% loreido grapes that had a little more acidity from the Arinto but still had the smoothness of loreido. Finally, she poured a wine from their family’s plot of Italian grapes that was more complex but not as fruity with lover acidity.

After the tasting around 4:30 we tried to call but were unable to reach the thermal bath house in Caldelas. Since it was less than ten miles we decided to drive there and were thrilled to find it open until 6:00 when we arrived a few minutes before 5:00.

We paid €14 each for a one hour soak and changed into our bathing suits and went to the pool, which was a large pool long enough for lap swimming but dominated by jets on two sides for hydro therapy.  The most interesting feature that I loved was the entire end of the pool devoted to water jets where you could lay down on an incline, hold on to submerged hand holds, rest your head on tiles out of the water, and jets of water would shoot water onto your shoulders, arms, lower back and hips for the best hydro-therapy experience I have ever had.  I lay there for 45 minutes while doing some of the exercises they taught me in Physical Therapy.

At 5:50 we left and returned to the room, 

We changed and left for dinner at 7:00.

During our visit to Casa Lata, I mentioned to the daughter Suzette’s desire to eat “baby pig”. The daughter said, “I know the perfect place, when do you want to go?”

We said 7:30 and she called and made us a reservation at A Rival in Fera Nova, which turned out to be about five miles from our room.

The area where we are staying seems to have almost continuous population with mostly small villages and larger villages at nodes of transportation or commerce. Each of the larger nodes seems to have a good, highly rated restaurant. A Rival is one of those restaurants that serve mostly regional cuisine and was highly rated at 4.5 by trip advisor.

When we were offered a menu, we noted that Ernesto’s Roast Baby Pig was the first item at €30 for two persons and we looked no further.

 The waitress spoke English that was a big plus when ordering.  We ordered a salad and sangria, but soon discovered the sangria was too sweet and asked the waitress what wine is most usually drunk with the pig and she said, “White sparkling wine.”

We asked her for a bottle of the white sparkling wine and soon found out it was a white vino verde that was slightly sweet and slightly carbonated, but very drinkable. Although, I realized that our taste in wine and that of the locals probably diverged on the issue of what wine was best with baby pig, we went with the total local pig eating experience.

The roasted pig was soon served cut up on a platter with bowls of potato chips, and a bowl of rice and the bowl of salad.

We ate and drank our way through most of the food except for the potato chips and Suzette stopped drinking the white wine after a glass.

By 9:00 we were done and returned to the room, where I ate one of the chocolate desserts we bought in Cambados and went to bed, but I awakened at 2:00 with my stomach unsettled from all the greasy food and ate a small container of Greek yogurt, drank a glass of water, and blogged this entry until 4:00.

Bon Appetit