Lisbon, Portugal

Myself and 4 other wine people flew from SFO to New Jersey to Lisbon earlier this month.  The trip was sponsored by our cork supplier to educate us about the cork we are purchasing.  We left Saturday morning and arrived in Lisbon Sunday morning at 9am.  Even though we were all tired, we began sightseeing in Lisbon.  This gorgeous piece of architecture is The Jeronimos Monastery.

I appreciate that the trip planners didn't have us go straight to the cork forest or the factories on the first day.  My mental abilities after flying all night were very poor.  Looking at pretty buildings was about all I could handle.  It's funny because the flight from New Jersey to Portugal is only 6 hours, but it's an international flight so they have to feed you.  We boarded the plane, two hours later they served dinner, then turned the cabin lights off for 3 hours and then woke everyone to feed us breakfast before landing.

It looks like a normal size door for me!  I guess most Portuguese people are short.  My fellow traveler Matt shows that it is in fact a tiny door.

 Next we went to the Belem Tower.  Very beautiful fortress, with cannons!  There is a tiny spiral staircase, not recommended for claustrophobics.   The same staircase is used for going up and down at the same time, I don't recommend it.

 But if you do make it to the top, you get to see this view.  And the bridge, looks just like the golden gate bridge, it's red and  everything.

To me this looks like San Francisco was photoshopped out.  And they put the giant Jesus statue from Rio De Janeiro there instead. 

 And then it was lunch time.  The Portuguese really impressed me with their hospitality and appetites. But I had a hard time with the schedule,  I like to eat dinner at 6pm and be in bed by 9pm.  Here we didn't start eating 'til 9pm and didn't get back to the hotel until after midnight.  The first few nights I wanted to fall asleep in my fish.

What cracked me up is that even though to me we were eating absurdly late, we were ALWAYS the first ones at every restaurant we went to.  This must have been the first among many give aways that we were an American group.

I was expecting to eat a lot of fish in Portugal but I was not expecting barnacles.  They look like sloth claws.  They didn't taste much better either.  But I can cross "eating barnacles" off the bucket list.

The following day, Monday, we drove to the forest.

 They harvest the raw material from May to late August, so we didn't get to see anything being harvested from the tree.  We did see the piles and piles of raw material.

 After the cork is harvested, they pile it up to "season" for a minimum of 6 months.  They leave it exposed to the elements, mainly to get the humidity levels to equilibrate.  

Then they boil the planks (to get them flat and workable), sort the pieces by size and ship it to the north to be punched.

More on boiling next week!

-L

Champagne in Champagne

The first two weeks of March I was in Europe.  Business and pleasure.  The reason for my trip was to visit Portugal and learn about cork harvesting and production.  Since I was already most of the way to Paris (my favorite place in the world, it's a cliche but it's true) I decided to take a few days to visit France before I came home.  My trip to Portugal was crazy informative but all those pictures and videos are taking longer to organize, so I'll write first about my time in France.

These pictures of Paris were taken on the only nice day while I was there.  This day it was about 68F and then a day later it snowed.

Here I am with cheese, meats and wine.  It was this night that I decided I should visit Champagne.  I'd never been and it seemed pretty close.  Also, I wanted to drink Champagne in Champagne.

 The next morning I went to Gare de l'est and bought a ticked to Reims.  The lady looked at me a little funny when I asked for a return ticket for that same evening.  I waited here for half an hour until the train came.  Then 45 minutes later by TGV (train of great fastness) I was in Reims.

I stepped off the train and immediately realized that this was really stupid.  I had no plan.  I didn't know where anything was, I think I expected the wineries to be walking distance from the train station.  I was probably going to need to take a bus, or a shuttle or taxi maybe?  So I head over to the Tourist Info booth to make a plan to make the most of my few hours in Reims.  This was a Sunday, so it was closed.  Turns out a lot of things are closed on a Sunday.  Here are the completely empty streets.  Check out the sweet parking job of the black car on the left.  

 Fortunately all was not lost.  Turns out the wineries are walking distance from the train station and each other.  This is the opposite of Napa and everywhere else I know in Northern California.  I walked to Tattinger (which was closed).  But it only took 20 minutes!

Then I walked 10 mins down the block to Veuve (also closed).  Which was actually OK, because I was just excited to be in such an adorable town near all these great Champagne houses.  My plan at this point was to walk into a wine shop and at least drink the stuff that I was walking by.  I was going to buy a bottle and drink it in the park, hobo style.  

This wine shop even had adorable bottle carriers.  A sardine tin, an old school refrigerator and maybe a hand bag of some sort.

 So I kept walking to the next winery on the map.  Pommery.  Oh joy of joys, it was open! And they had a tour starting in 10 minutes!  What luck!

 The tour starts down the stairs into their caves where the wine is stored. 116 steps down.

I do have tiny hands, but those are also giant 12L bottles.  A whole freaking hallway of them.

This is part of their library collection.  They have 1 bottle from 1898 and 1 from 1874.  Eighteen seventy four!  That's nuts to me.  That bottle has been around for a lot of things.  The Pommery (and I'm sure other caves in Reims are similar) cave was one of the most impressive places I have every been inside of.  Unfortunately with the low light my pathetic iphone camera could not capture the amazingness, so I wont bother posting those pictures.  But believe me, it was unbelievable.

At the end of the tour I finally had Champagne in Champagne and I bought some to have in Napa too. I took the train back to Paris that evening and came home a day later.  I've been home for six days and I've been swamped trying to catch up on work.

I'm really looking forward to making some sense of the pictures from Portugal trip (the real reason for my transatlantic trip) and to share a lot of what I learned about cork.  It's the weekend soon, so that should give me time. . . .

-L