When I worked in a wine shop in Holland Park, my Monday-to-Thursday customers had a routine. One night it was a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and a bottle of non-brand Champagne, the next a Cloudy Bay and a Brouilly, or perhaps a Montagny with a pack of quail eggs, all bought with the unsurprised ennui of people earning City bonuses. I sold them the bottles and went home to hunt for something I could drink every night on a shop wage, and that hunt, eventually, led me to the Dão.
Working in wine is a bit like Upstairs, Downstairs. You spend your days handing the finest bottles to the people upstairs, and once you’ve tasted some of the best wines in the world, going back to what fits your own budget is harder than you’d think. I’ve seen people stay in dead-end jobs for decades just to keep their wine discount. I couldn’t drink like my customers every night, I had no million-pound bonus to lull me to sleep, and my hard-working liver had to last the distance, so like everyone else downstairs, I learned to box clever.
My method is simple enough to fit on the back of a till receipt. I look for wines that are more about pleasure and quality than reputation and presentation, with real finesse at a price well below what you’d pay for the same thing from a better-known region (for now). These wines tend to be cheaper for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s in the bottle, such as a name nobody can pronounce or a region without a marketing budget. At the moment, I find plenty of this in organic reds from the Dão. My checklist has three boxes, Dão, organic and Portuguese, and a conventionally farmed Dão ticks two of them, as does an organic red from elsewhere in Portugal. Two out of three strikes me as a perfectly respectable score.
The Dão sits in central Portugal, just south of the much more famous Douro Valley, and is the original home of Touriga Nacional, one of the principal grapes in port. The best reds are made mainly from Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz, which you may know as Tempranillo, often blended with Jaen and Alfrocheiro. Jaen is the same grape as Mencía across the border in Spain, and you’ll also find some Bastardo, better known to Jura lovers as Trousseau, along with a little Baga, the grape that dominates neighbouring Bairrada. Plenty of producers use oak and long maceration to make big, bold, tannic reds, and while that style has its admirers, I’m not usually one of them. The Dão I go looking for is the fresher kind, the bottle you’d want on a Tuesday, not at a banquet.
The region takes its name from the Dão river, which has spent thousands of years carving its way through granite. The best vineyards sit high up in the foothills of the mountains that ring the region, and those cool heights go a long way towards explaining the freshness in the wines. I also have a fancy idea that the granite itself plays a part, though the more technical wine people would ask me to prove how much soil really affects taste, and I’d have to admit I can’t. My suspicion is that when we say “minerality” we usually mean acidity. Whatever you call it, a good Dão red has that freshness without any pretension at all, whether it’s a supermarket special or a bottle from a specialist importer.
If I had to point you to a starting place, it would be Quinta das Maias, an organic estate high in the foothills of the Serra da Estrela, made by the team at Quinta dos Roques. The red is mostly Jaen, with no oak to get in the way, and it has all the crunch and freshness I go looking for in the Dão. The name comes from the yellow May flowers that grow around the vineyards, which you’ll find on the label. A small reminder that a place is more than its soil.
The Dão keeps surprising me. It’s a beautiful part of the world, full of winemakers, some new and some long established, making excellent organic wines. I still think about those Holland Park customers with their Cloudy Bay and their quail eggs, buying the names they already knew, and I suspect we had more fun downstairs because we had to go looking. So go exploring and trust your own palate, and when you find something you love, keep it close and perhaps don’t tell too many people upstairs.
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