Portugal -Douro Valley

Dear blog readers, I have had wine and wine and port and I'm not sure how good this post is going to be.  Portuguese internet had been consistently crappy so far which means it takes me roughly 2 hours to upload pictures in order to do these blog posts if I refresh every 5 minutes.  I'm not a patient person and this is honestly really starting to piss me off so if you don't see a blog post tomorrow it's because the internet is even worse than the amazingly crappy internet that I've had so far.

Today started out with a rental car debacle that I am choosing to not go into.  The important part of the story is that we went from Porto to the Douro river valley (wine region) today and got a later start than we really wanted to. The good parts version is we had an amazing lunch at a restaurant were you pretty much get to choose from the 2 dishes they are making that day and the authentic Portuguese grandma will make lunch for you.  It was amazing and with a glass of wine for Jeff and I and an orange juice for Wren was a crazy  16 Euros.

The view of the little town was very pretty of the wine region and had a great playground.

Check out that crazy old wisteria vine!  It was a beautiful pergola.
This was a tiny town with a lovely public area.
Pictures of the Douro river valley on our way to the vineyard that we stayed at.

More pretty pictures of grapes.
So this is actually from where we stayed, Quinto do Vallado. 

Wren playing among the vines.
As part of our stay at Quinto do Vallado we got a winery tour and tasting.  One of the cool things about this winery is they have been around for over 300 years and is still owned by descendants of the WOMAN who started this winery.  It originally only produced port but started a new label in the 1990's to make wine.  Here are a couple of pictures from the winery tour.

All the lovely barrels of wine.

This room had a serious musty funk to it.  It is where they age the port.

I love the visual impact of this wall of wine bottles.

Here it is again, it was just so much fun to take pictures of.

...And one more time!  It's my blog, I can be redundant if I want to, lol!
The winery tour ended with a tasting.  We had a couple minutes to chill and then it was of to a paired wine dinner at the winery, hence the slightly intoxicated vacationers.  It was lovely!

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