If you ever get the chance to attend a wine festival, GO! Sure, tasting lots of wines is fun, but I’ve found that the educational events during the festival weekend or week are highly valuable! Last Winter, I attended the Colorado Springs Wine Festival and the theme was Portuguese wines – a wine production region which was generally unknown to me. Among the Portuguese wines that I tasted was Loureiro.
An interesting aspect to Portuguese wines is that they’re quite unique to Portugal and are often isolated to their production regions. At the Wine Festival that I attended, I found myself frequently asking, “is this the varietal or the region?” Typically the answer was “varietal”. This caught me off-guard because I felt like I was fairly well-versed in varietals, but Portuguese varietals are special! Many Portuguese white wines, to include Loureiro, fall into the category of “Vinho Verde”. Vinho Verde, literally translating to “Green Wine”, refers to younger wines. Vinho Verde white wines are typically light, refreshing, sometimes subtly effervescent, and often take on “green” traits like grass, lime or herbs.
This 2018 Passaros Escolha Loureiro and Albarino blend (exclusively Loureiro wines are a bit hard to come by) was an excellent representation of the Vinho Verde style. The color was a muted gold, light bodied with average alcohol content. The aromas were of lime, grass, green apple with a subtlety of florals. The taste was prominently lime with high acidity, soft peach and pear and resembled a Sauvignon Blanc. There was something about the aroma that I couldn’t quite identify, which inspired me to do a little research. Apparently bay leaves are common in Loureiro aromas, so I opened my spice cabinet, smelled bay leaves and sure enough! That was it! This was truly a crisp, refreshing, quality wine.
This Loureiro retails for $11-15 and I gave it a four out of five cork rating.