TRAVEL
Make the Douro Valley your next port of call
The release of a port and Irish whiskey collaboration brings childhood memories back to Tom Doorley
The terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley, Portugal, can be easily reached by train or car from Porto
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The Sunday Times
My enthusiasm for port started a few years before I was allowed to taste it. I was barely 14 years old when I came across a book titled Port by Rupert Croft-Cooke. It told the story of one of the world’s great fortified wines so evocatively, so sensually, that I was seduced.
Even then, in the 1970s, the picture it painted of Portugal’s vineyards in the Douro Valley and the vast, sleeping warehouses of Vila Nova de Gaia was changing. But years later when I became a wine writer I travelled to the region and it felt like I was revisiting a familiar place. So, yes, port and I go back a long way, and in terms of wine it was my first love.
Before
