Portuguese white wine and salted cod is a match made in heaven
Esporão Reserva White Organic, Alentejo, Portugal 2022 (from £14.95, cheerswinemerchants.co.uk; thewinesociety.com; cambridgewine.com) A startling fact picked out by the wine-and-food writer Joanna Simon in a typically elegant and informative piece on the classic Portuguese baked salt-cod-and-potato dish Bacalhau a Gomes de Sà on worldoffinewine.com recently: apparently Portugal, a country with a population of just over 10million people, accounts for some 20% of all the cod consumed in the world each year. As Simon goes on to point out, there is a long tradition in Portugal of drinking red wines with the national fish (not least the high-acid reds of Vinho Verde in the lushly verdant north of the country). But on a recent family holiday in which cod (in various guises, but always of the salted variety) was on the menu every day, I found I preferred to choose an accompaniment from the country’s winemakers’ infinitely many ways with white grapes: starting with Esporão’s blend from southerly Alentejo, with its subtle wisp of smoky oak, peachy fullness and grapefruity tang.
Waitrose Loved & Found Cerceal, Dão, Portugal 2023 (£8.99, Waitrose) One of the things that makes Portuguese wine so attractive to obsessive wine enthusiasts like me is that so many of its best wines are made from grape varieties that you just don’t find anywhere else – and which, crucially, make wines that don’t taste like wines from anywhere else. That Esporão blend, for example, mixes up antão vaz, arinto and roupeiro – while one of my favourite whites from the Central Portuguese Dão region, Textura da Estrela Branco 2022 (£19.40, justerinis.com), blends the local encruzado, bical and cerceal for a wine that is full of nervy energy and tingle, not to mention a bacalhau-friendly seasoning of sea-salty minerals. If Portuguese whites are often best as blends, it’s nonetheless fun to see what these varieties can do on their own: and the white Portuguese member of Waitrose’s Loved & Found collection of unusual own-label wines made from Dão cerceal is a snappy, fresh, subtly nutty wine full of character.
Symington Mendes Contacto Alvarinho, Vinho Verde, Portugal 2023 (from £16, thewinesociety.com; thesolentcellar.co.uk) Portugal’s most famous white grape variety owes its renown to the canny marketeers who work with it on the other side of the country’s northern border with Spain. Albariño, as it’s known in Galicia’s Rías Baixas (source of most bottles of the variety in the UK and elsewhere), is alvarinho in Portugal’s Vinho Verde. However it’s spelt, this recently fashionable grape variety is responsible for a fair amount of rather humdrum, indeterminately fruity, if perfectly drinkable, dry white wine. But in the right hands, whether Spanish or Portuguese, it is also capable of making wines that combine a refreshing salted citrus raciness with subtle but evocative notes of wild flowers and herbs and succulent ripe white peachiness. One of the finest Portuguese exponents of alvarinho is Anselmo Mendes, a winemaker born and bred in Monçao, the area of Vinho Verde that is the variety’s traditional heartland. For the immaculate, scintillating Contacto he teams up with the Symington family, a noted producer of Port and table wines in the Douro, for a wine that was born for bacalhau.
Follow David Williams on X @Daveydaibach
