WBW: ‘Victor, Victoria?’ My dinner with a cross-dressing grape from Portugal

I stopped into The Wine Cellar at Stuyvesant Plaza on Tuesday expecting to stump the kind young man behind the counter.

This month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday is sponsored by my friends at Catavino, and they had given me and 100 other wine bloggers no small order – taste a Portuguese table wine, but not from the Duoro and not a Vinho Verde. Never one to turn down an adventure, I lashed my corkscrew to my belt and set off on a ‘wine safari,’ in search of what I thought would surely be quite an elusive bottle.

Well, I’m retiring my safari hat - the bottle was right there on the endcap. The Wine Cellar has discovered what a great up-and-coming region Portugal is and makes a special effort to purchase interesting bottles for adventurous wine drinkers.

I chose the 2005 Catarina Vinho Regional Terras Do Sado, a Vinho Branco made from 68% Fernao Pires and 32% Chardonnay, part of which is aged in new oak. At only 13 dollars, it was a fantastic way to try a Peninsula de Setubal table wine.

The label describes the wine as being full flavored with a crisp zesty finish, so I decided to try my glassful with fresh goat’s milk cheese on crackers, a simple filet of trout seasoned with salt and pepper, and angel hair pasta with olive oil, parmesan cheese, oregano and pepper.

I excitedly uncorked my bottle and poured a serving into my “big ass glass.” The color was a surprisingly vibrant yellow, and my first sniff confirmed why - there is one less oak tree in the world. Along with the oak I tasted a bright green apple Sauvignon Blanc-like flavor along with the typically smooth Chardonnay flavor profile.

The wine showed off its oak when paired with both the pasta and the tangy goat cheese, and matched well with the trout. At 13.5 % alcohol, this was a big wine for me, so drink carefully. This is a good wine to pair with fish and cheese, but the story behind it is almost as tasty as the wine itself!

According to Wikipedia, Captain Fernão Pires de Andrade was a Portuguese merchant. His encounter with Chinese Ming Dynasty marked the start of European connection to China in near-modern times. But in Bairrada, Portugal, the Fernão Pires grape is known as Maria Gomes. Many grapes have more than one name, a fact that had me up late studying grape names for my recently completed Certified Specialist of Wine exam, but I have never seen one named after a man and a woman at the same time!

History has apparently left it to the storytellers to make sense of this fact, and tell the tale of Maria Gomes. I will leave it up to you to try a bottle yourself and see if you’ll call this oaky, tangy pleaser Senor Fernao or Senorita Maria.