WoW (World of Wine) Museum Porto

Ola

Today we wake to a rather cool van again - it seems we have run out of gas overnight. Pedro, the owner comes to the rescue again, gets on the phone and orders a new bottle for delivery this afternoon- so it won’t be a 2nd cold night 😮‍💨 .

We are off to WOW (World of Wine) today which is a huge complex of various museums and experience areas. Our campsite hosts organise our tickets, and suggest we order an Uber to drop us off as the bus or train don’t quite go there, and it’s really cheap ( and at €6 it is almost cheaper than the bus!).

The WOW is situated in old Port stores high up on the hill on the Villa Nova de Gaia side, and is a complex of museums, educational facilities and restaurants that make good use of the old production facilities that have been relocated elsewhere. They were essentially abandoned until Taylor’s (most famous Port House) and others got the $ and approvals together to save the area and generate both tourist and local traffic.
And we and about 6 other people have it to ourselves! Well not really, but when we arrive early afternoon it seems like we are the only people there. So no crowds, no rushing, no jostling for the best position to read something.

We see the "Porto through the Ages" exhibition first, tracing the development of Portugal through the ages up to modern days, and particularly how they jostled with Spain for territory for their own land, they fought for a long time until finally Portugal regained its sovereignty in 1640 and they signed the treaty of Lisbon in 1668. And earlier for overseas territories, the Treaty of Tordesillas signed in 1494, drew a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands which split the world into spheres of influence- Portugal had the lands East of there and Spain had the West.
And I guess they still didn’t have that ‘the world is round concept’ quite in mind yet!! Anyhow.

We have lunch in one of the little restaurants:

We went from there to the Wine Experience which charts a year in the life of the vines and grapes (helpfully showing the months for both Northern and Southern hemispheres), from dormancy through budburst, flowering and forming teeny grapes, veraison , harvesting, post harvest leaf drop and back to dormancy. Also different soils types around Portugal and their equivalents around the world. Turns out the Dao and Douro areas have tough, low-nutrient crystalline granite and poor, low-nutrient sand and schist soils, just the same as the Stanthorpe wine growing areas (who knew?). Actually there is an interesting globe with straight lines drawn around the circumference showing where the grape growing areas are in both hemispheres - southern QLD just scrapes in.

Interesting wall thingy:

Old grape truck:

Further on you do a quiz to determine what sort of Grape you are, a jelly bean test (hold your nose and chew then release to show the interaction between aroma and taste,), a set of beakers with flavors for you to work out what they are, and most importantly a tasting of 3 wines (a white a red and a Port).

We have a fancy little gelato along the way:

It’s dark when we emerge, and we are worn out, so it’s time to head home, but our trip doesn’t go smoothly. I step down a bigger step then I thought and twist my ankle. And Bob gets instructions on where to order the Uber to come to, and accidentally/stupidly orders it to pick up and drop off from the same place (yes apparently it can be done). So we have to sort that out when the driver turns up, with fractured English and Portuguese we get there, albeit a couple of Euro extra than just us getting in the car one side and getting out the other side!! Never mind.

Central plaza of WoW - all lit up for Christmas:

That's it for today.