Portugal's Best-Kept Wine Secret | Exploring Algarve Wine

The Elgarve has a wine problem. Not because the wine is bad, in fact quite the opposite. For a region with over 300 days of sunshine a year, thousands of years of winemaking history and dozens of award-winning vineyards, almost nobody talks about it. People come here for the beaches, they come here for the golf, they come here for the seafood, but hidden amongst these hills is an entire wine culture that most visitors never discover. And the more I started digging into it, the stranger it became. Because some of the Elgarve's most exciting wines don't follow the traditional rules. Many of its best vineyards are hidden away down country roads and unless you know exactly where to look, you'll probably drive right past them. So today we're setting out to uncover the Elgarve's hidden wine story. Thousands dream of moving to Portugal. Elgarve Addicts helps make happen. With expert guidance on visas, property and life in the Elgarve, we take the stress out of relocation. Start your new chapter with a free consultation. Wine goes back a lot further than most people think. The earliest evidence we have comes from Georgia, around 6000 BC, where people were already fermenting grapes in clay pots buried in the ground. From there, wine slowly spread across Europe and by the time of the Romans, around 2000 years ago, it had firmly arrived in Portugal, where they planted vineyards and built the foundations of the wine culture you still see today. But Portuguese wine as we know it, really took shape in the 18th century, thanks to the Marquês de Pombal, who essentially created one of the world's first regulated wine regions, the Douro. He introduced strict rules about where wine could be made and how it could be made, which is where this whole idea of DOC wines come from. Now fast forward to today, and Portugal has over 250 native grape varieties, one of the most diverse wine countries in the world. And here in the Elgarve, you'll find grapes like Negramol, Cratubranco and Castelao, local varieties that thrive in the heat and give the wines a very distinct regional character. But in my mind, there's a snag. Hi, my name is Nick and I've been living in the Elgarve for 25 years, and I absolutely love it, I really do. But where I grew up, in Cape Town in South Africa, it was a little bit different. We were super spoiled when it came to wine farms. Now I don't know, I think there are about 300 wine farms near Cape Town, and all of them are seriously well versed in wine tourism. When you come to the Elgarve, the wines are fantastic. The wine farm tourism offering in the Elgarve, nah, not so much. Some farms are fantastic, some are not. And it's a little bit tricky, it's a little bit hit and miss, so that's why I thought I'd make a little bit of a wine guide. Now we've developed this wine blog post on our website, so I'll leave that link in the description, so go check it out. But there's, I'm going to explain to you through the course of this how you can get around this issue. Because we all just want to enjoy the wine, right? Don't we? No hassles. My solution to make everything easier was to bring along Vince, who is an actual sommelier, and he suggested we go to Quinto dos Sentidos to start off. All right, so we're here at Quinto dos Sentidos with André and Vince. André is going to take us and show us a little bit around Quinto dos Sentidos and tell us exactly what's happening here, okay? So should we go for a little walk? So Quinto dos Sentidos is the farm of the senses, because Beate and Chalo, they wanted to create a place where you could explore all your senses. The smell, the touch, the taste, to hearing, and of course looking around. Just smash the leaves and smell. Oh yeah, it's very peppery, huh? Yeah, even pink pepper. Wow, it smells amazing. Many different type of things from all around the world, some more typical like the cactus over here, some more exotic like frangipani. Okay, yeah, this is very tropical, huh? Here's a rosemary here. This is a little bush of rosemary here. Yeah, a little bush, yeah. Wow, that's beautiful. So they've got about 150 different types of fruit trees here, which is amazing. Dragon fruit, bananas, what else here? Oh, wow. Different type of mangoes. Oh, it's lots of different mangoes. This is ginger. This is like a root. That right there is stevia, which is just basically, I just had a bit of it now, and it's like pure sugar. It's crazy. So here on the more flat side, we have our white vineyards with two Portuguese varieties, Antão Vaz and Derinto, and so this is the white area, and then we have the reds mostly on the hilly side. Lots of frogs. So what you can do, Andre was just telling me, is you can order a picnic, so you can get, and then you can arrive here, and then they'll bring the picnic down, and you can have it in this beautiful environment right over here. It's very much like we used to do in South Africa. So we try to work in the most sustainable way. One example is we work a lot with the natural grass, and also we plant some seeds to replace some of the bad grass, and keeping the grass for as long as possible. This is from Japan? Yeah, the yuzu lemon. If you smell it, it's a mix of tangerine with lemon with orange. The bartenders, they love this to make nice cocktails. Yeah, it's quite sweet. Strawberries in the bales. These guys have got all the fruits in the world here. There's a total of 10 wines. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten wines, and we're starting off with Watteau, which is always a good idea. They're definitely not going to give us this one. Our wines have the name of the census. It's 2023. Oh, this is a crab thing. Very nice. Professional olive oil tasting happens in small glasses. They are either dark blue or dark orange opaque, so you can't see the color. Okay. You can combine it. Yeah, it's nice and light. Lovely though. Wow. If you need anything, you just shout. Okay, fantastic. Thank you. Now, I took great effort to go and make a map just for you, so you can go and figure out all these wine farms. There are about 30 wine farms on this map, so go check it out, but if you do know of any wine farms that aren't there or actually have stopped functioning, let me know and I'll edit it up and share it so more people can find more wonderful wine experiences. When I made the last wine video, Arvad wasn't even open, and I've been watching it launch, and I've watched its Instagram. I've watched this group called Edit. They have these Edit parties, all the young, cool kids, and they have parties all around the place, and they had a party at Arvad Wine Farm, so I was dying to go and see it, and when we arrived, it didn't disappoint, but by chance we could get in because we hadn't booked, and they have all these booking sessions and everything, so thankfully we came at the right time, and they just squeezed us in, which is quite unnatural. Three different wine tastings, so all of them, they are served also with Bordeaux cheeses, some cold meat, some fresh bread, some toast, some jam. Usually we try to work with local producers. And how do you book? Yeah, you can book, that's what I'm going to say, and book directly on our website. So usually in the low season, we are open seven days per week, apart from the wine tastings that we have daily, we also have the picnics in the vineyards, depending on the weather of course, and we also have a river house, so just beside the river, with a beautiful deck, and over there we also do exclusive lunch for groups, minimum of 10 people, maximum of 20, which are cooking Cataplana. Okay, excellent, that's wonderful, yeah. So here's the truth about Algarve wine, it's not that it's hard to find, it's that it's hidden, it's protected, and it's only there for those who know how to find it. Because no, you can't just turn up, you need to book, but now you don't have to guess anymore, whether you chose the easy route and book a guided experience, or take the wheel yourself with our map, and our downloadable pdf, and plan your own journey, you've got the key. That's the difference between just being here, and truly experiencing the Algarve. We're Algarve Addicts, and we'll show you how to do it right. We'll see you next week, but if you need any help relocating to the Algarve, click through to our website algarveaddicts.com. We offer tours, immigration assistance, long-term rentals, and we can buy your house.