Moura, Portugal - Day 2
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Our day began in a countryside house at Burrico D'orada, just outside Moura, Portugal. Andi booked us a lovely two-bedroom, two-bathroom place to stay here with all the comforts of home. The first thing Andi did when he woke up this morning was start a fire in the wood-burning stove. Sitting by a roaring fire is such a relaxing start to the day while we sip our morning coffee — even more so today as the weather outside was rainy and cool.
Around 9:00am, Rita, who is the owner of Burrico D'orada, delivered a breakfast basket on the doorstep. Breakfast is not included in the price of our stay, but for €27 each day (€9 per adult; half price for kids), she curated a basket filled with coffee, milk and juice, local yogurt and granola, fresh fruit, homemade bread and rolls with organic butter, jams, and honey, local black pig sausages, sheep and goat cheeses for us. The sweetest part of our breakfast basket wasn’t the food, but the hand-written note she included which detailed all the local and homemade/homegrown products we were eating for breakfast. The delicious yogurt parfaits inside jam jars were my favorite.
The Alentejo Region of Portugal is known for its wines. Rita recommended we spend the day learning about a special wine unique to this area called tahla wines. The process of tahla wine making in central Portugal dates back to the Romans in the 2nd century. There are old Roman ruins to visit in this area, a tahla wine museum in the small town of Vila de Frades, and wineries to sample tahla wines produced today.
Unfortunately, I felt terrible this morning. My head was pounding from all the congestion in my sinuses. I asked Andi if we could reschedule the wine tasting we booked for this morning so that I could rest for a few hours. Aden’s head congestion didn’t sound much better and he hardly had an appetite at breakfast, though he seems to have a lot more energy than I do.
Andi contacted Rita, and she was able to rebook the wine tasting we planned to go to this morning for tomorrow afternoon instead. Now with a slow morning on our hands, I rested and blogged in bed while Andi, Tory, and Aden hung out in the living room. Tory has been obsessed with the markers and blank white notebook that Rita left for the kids to use, and has spent hours drawing pictures in it. Aden got all the games and toys out this morning and built dominos on the floor, jumped rope, and kicked around a soccer ball.
Being sick while traveling is the worst because the last thing I felt like doing today was touring around town to learn about wine making. But, I also knew that we are only in Alentejo for a few days and I wanted to experience all there was to see & learn here. I forced myself out of bed at 11:00am, got dressed, and took a bunch of cold medicine. The four of us set off in our car to visit Villa Romana de São Cucufate — Roman ruins from the 2nd - 6th centuries — in the nearby village of Vila de Frades. “Where are we going, Dad?” Tory and Aden wanted to know with a grumble in their voices. “Do we have to learn facts?” We’ve seen a lot of castles and ruins on this trip to Europe.
At São Cucufate, Andi paid €3 admission (kids were free) for us to enter into the archeological site. It was a chilly 55°F and rainy today, which made walking around old ruins less than enjoyable. On the bright side, we had the entire place to ourselves.
There are several clusters of ruins on this site where Romans once lived and cultivated the land. Signage placards posted around the buildings told what the buildings may have been used for, and showed blueprint drawings of the buildings reconstructed. This is the largest villa of Roman ruins in all of Portugal, and is thought to be one of the best preserved examples in the world.
After Roman occupation, the ruins were used as two different Christian monasteries from the 9th - 18th century. For that reason, the church building is relatively intact and visitors to the site are allowed to walk inside to see the ruins. If these walls could talk … we could feel the history as we wandered in and through the ruins.
The light drizzle of rain falling around us turned more steady, so the four of us made our way to our car parked in the parking lot. From São Cucufate, we drove to the Talha Wine Interpretive Center in the village of Vila de Frades to learn more about the method of tahla wine production that’s been practiced in this area of Portugal since the Romans.
We paid €2/pp (again, kids free) for admission into the interpretive center. A very nice man working the front desk explained what we’d find in the museum, and encouraged Tory and Aden to use the interactive iPads at each exhibit to play games and learn facts about the tahla wine making process. Luckily, we were the only people in the interpretive center except for one other poor couple because the iPad games made really loud, annoying sounds. It kept Tory and Aden engaged in learning though, which I suppose is the point.
After visiting the interpretive center, I was beginning to understand and appreciate the history and process of tahla wine making. There were many examples in the center of large clay pots, called tahla pots, which is how the tahla wine is made. The method for making talha wine hasn’t changed much in the past two thousand years. Grapes are crushed and then put inside the clay tahla pots where spontaneous fermentation takes place. Unlike the process of storing wine in wood barrels, tahla clay pots can be used over and over. Some of the pots in the interpretive center were hundreds of years old.
By now, it was 3:30pm and we had about 30 minutes until our tahla wine tasting scheduled at 4:00pm. We tried to go to the wine tasting early, but the woman was with another customer. I could have just laid down in the car for 30 minutes, but Andi suggested we go to one the neighborhood “snack bar” establishments that every Portuguese town seems to have.
There were only a few other locals inside the snack bar, so we easily found a table and sat down. Coming here felt similar to a movie when the new person comes to town and walks into the popular town watering hole. The music stops abruptly, and everyone turns around to stare. We just rolled with it though. Andi ordered a few desserts from the cold case and we each picked out a soda beverage from the cooler. Tory and Aden are always happy to eat dessert, so they were pleased with our last-minute decision to stop at the snack bar.
At 4:00pm, we made our way down the street to Tahla de Frades winery. A woman named Dina greeted us at the door, and welcomed us inside the small tasting room. Dina was super friendly, and did her best to explain to us in English about the process and history of making tahla wines. The technique of making tahla wines has been passed down from generation to generation since the Romans inhabited this area of Portugal. It really helped that we’d had the experience of visiting São Cucufate beforehand.
“Take what you know about wine making, and throw it out the window!” Dina told us. It was true that tahla wines tasted completely different than other wines we’d tried in the past. The tahla wines were very aromatic and bold, but simple tasting. The rich amber color of the white wines comes from the clay pots in which they are made inside.
Dina was so sweet with Tory and Aden, and provided lots of snacks for them to eat while Andi and I did the tasting. Together, the kids ate a whole loaf of bread and about four packages of crackers, as well as cheese and black pork sausage. I think my favorite part of the whole tasting experience was Dina herself! She was so passionate about the region of Alentejo, her hometown of Vila de Frades, and the making of tahla wines.
After our tasting, we stopped by the grocery store in the nearby town of Beja to get something to eat for dinner and to get more cold medicine. Then, the four of us returned to our rental home at Burrico D'orada. We spent the rest of our evening lounging around, watching episodes of Big Bang Theory on television, and eating chicken nuggets (Aden), chicken and fried rice (Andi), gnocchi (Tory) and leftovers (me) for dinner. Perhaps some of the topics in Big Bang Theory were a little inappropriate for Tory and Aden’s ages, but that was the only television show playing in English and the internet signal is terrible at this property. It’s amazing what we all do when we can’t be on our phones and computers — talk, play games, and watch TV together.
We are enjoying this area of Alentejo so much that we decided to extend our stay at Burrico D'orada for one more day. I’m hoping Aden and I feel better tomorrow, and that the sun is shining. We’ve had so much rain in Portugal this past month, but I know it would be just beautiful here if the sun would shine down on these gorgeous, green pasturelands.
