Portugal revisited

I am heading to Faro in the morning for a few days. My last visit to Portugal was many moons ago when its tourism industry was in its infancy and I was midway through my computer science degree course in Trinity College Dublin. While I have tracked the changes in ICT fairly consistently in the interim, it'll be interesting to see how Portugal has changed - given that my only visits since then were to a conference in Lisbon (when I hardly made it outside the hotel conference centre) and to Madeira, which given its distance from the Iberian Peninsula proper, hardly counts at all! Colm, my wine expert brother, has given me a list of wines to try when I'm there, so I'm really looking forward to trying them out. As his handwriting is fairly illegible, I will be struggling to identify some of the grapes/regions, but then I think I might struggle anyway, as my knowledge of Portugese wines is so limited that I'll be lucky to make any sense at all of the whole wine scene there.

Hmmm, he mentions Loueiro and Trajadura grapes. Then he moves onto the Moncao region, and talks about Alvarinho - and that this is the same grape as one of my favourites - Albarinho, so I'll be happy with that. I am told to try wines from Bairrada, which should be similar to Riesling style wines (that looks very interesting).

On the red front (my friends in Portugal are mainly red wine drinkers, so I better pay attention!), - Douro DOC - made from Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz (same as Tempranillo I believe) they sound good. Bairrada DOC - Pinot Noir type wines we think, worth giving a go - the local grap is Baga. Alentejo is another option... among lots of others on his list. I think I'll try them all and report back in due course. Portugese wines have benefitted from a serious injection of EU investment funds over the past number of years, and they should be very different from the wines I would have tasted all those years ago. I'll report back - maybe I'll also be able to report on restaurants to visit around the Algarve, shoe shops to visit (sorry boys!), and any other areas of interest...