Humble Steward: Portuguese whites will help keep the dog days at bay

BY JIM RAPER

DURING A TRIP to Portugal in the summer of 1997, I swore off the country's most popular white wine, Vinho Verde. I was served glass after glass that looked cloudy and tasted bitter. This was not the "green" wine, as in young and fresh, that the name implies.

For the better part of the next decade I avoided Vinho Verde while I was becoming exceedingly fond of Portuguese reds, such as those from the Douro region. (Some Vinho Verde red and rose is made, but you don't find many examples in the United States. For our purposes, Vinho Verde refers to white wine.) My harsh judgment of the king of Portuguese whites began to crumble only a few years ago, probably as I enjoyed a glass of it on a hot day sitting around a swimming pool. Slowly I have entered the Vinho Verde camp, and I am ready now to recommend it as the perfect wine to beat late summer heat.

Ah! The dog days of a Hampton Roads summer - when mosquitoes have won out and the front lawn, or what's left of it, pricks your bare feet. This is no time for a ponderous chardonnay - you want refreshment from your white wine, a clean citrus and green apple tartness, and perhaps a little petillance, or fizz. You don't want heavy alcohol; 9 percent or so will suffice. And you also want a wine that mates well with light foods such as cold crab, shrimp or chicken, and grilled vegetables.

You want Vinho Verde.

This wine is made in northern Portugal, under the overhanging nib of Spain that has become famous for its albarino whites. On the Portugal side of the border, albarino goes by the name of alvarinho, and I've been told more than once by wine salesmen that Vinho Verde is made with alvarinho. They call it a poor man's albarino. But the best I can tell, the great majority of the Vinho Verdes sold in Virginia are made with other white grapes - loureiro and trajadura are widely used. You must shell out a few dollars more in order to get a Vinho Alvarinho, which is the wine of a smaller denomination within the large Vinho Verde zone.

Because so many white grapes indigenous to the northwest corner of Portugal and Spain are eligible to be used in the making of Vinho Verde, there is quite a bit of flavor variation. Some have a more pronounced mineralization. Some remind of lime or ripe peach, while others have the tart apple flavor. Some have a lot of fizz, others not so much. Nevertheless, I can say that I've drunk quite a few - certainly more than 10 labels - of Vinho Verdes in Virginia the past two years and every one of them has been pleasant. The prices also are pleasant. Most retail for $5 to $9.

Those cloudy and dull-tasting Vinho Verdes I had in Portugal years ago bring up another point about these wines. As a rule, they are not vintage dated. For wines that are meant to be drunk young, this presents a potential problem. A 4- or 5-year-old Vinho Verde is liable to be cloudy and dull-tasting. Your retailer more than likely will stock only the freshest bottles. But for your own due diligence, check the label closely, usually on the back, for a registration number. The last four digits (sometimes printed in a different colored ink) are the year the wine was bottled. Wine from the grape harvest of 2007 was bottled early this year. So if the digits are 2008, that means the wine is from the 2007 vintage and is the freshest available.

Here are some labels to look for - Casal Garcia, Aveleda, Famega, Broadbent, Gazela and Twin Vines.