2015 Quinta do Atiade Vinha Do Arco Douro Valley Portugal 750 ml

The Tinto that Blends California Fruit with Bordeaux Bones

The trick, we learned half an hour into our first drive through Portugal’s Douro Valley, is to not look down. Whereas similar switchbacks in the United States would have guard rails lining the route, here in the beating heart of the most famous wine region in Portugal, there were nothing but cliffs and precipitously terraced vineyards separating our rental Renault (and us inside!) from the river 300 meters below.

Knuckles turned white. The car remained eerily silent. Finally, one of us floated the greatest idea anyone’s ever had: “Can we please stop somewhere for a bottle of wine?”

We were soon sitting around an old, charmingly chipped wood table, long since faded by the sun to the color of cooked honey. After a drive like that, we all agreed that we needed a wine that would balance out the stresses of the morning. So we ordered a bottle of 2015 Quinta Do Ataide Vinha Do Arco, hoping for the best.

We didn’t know much about it aside from the fact that it’s produced by Symington Family Estates, which over the course of five generations has been responsible for some of the finest Ports and dry wines in the country—Dow’s, Graham’s, Cockburn’s, Prats + Symington, and more are all in the portfolio—and that it was crafted entirely from Touriga Nacional, the most noble indigenous grape variety in Portugal.

The server approached our table, a mysterious smile causing his massive handlebar mustache to twitch at its upturned corners, and poured us all a taste of the inky liquid. The table was immediately enveloped in a cloud of blue and black fruit, flowers, and sweet spices. Those ambrosial aromas followed through to the palate with an utterly transfixing combination of ripe, generous Napa fruit carried on a structure that seemed lifted directly from Bordeaux.

Before the server had a chance to finish filling all of our glasses, we had already ordered a second bottle: It was just that delicious.

And that’s how our plans changed. After a lunch of garlicky, smoky alheira sausage and enough salt-cod (the famous bacalhau of the country) to feed a small team of vineyard workers, and a call to an old friend of ours at Symington, we hit the road for Quinta Do Ataide. This wine, we decided unanimously, had to be offered exclusively to Wine Access members.

We were greeted at the estate by three-decade-old vines planted on schist flecked with alluvial clay, and could tell immediately that the grapes hanging from the trellises were incredibly healthy. As it turns out, the organic vineyard was originally purchased by Cockburn’s as a source for Port, but the wine was such a standout that it now is used for this incredible tinto, the local labeling term for dry reds.

Wine Enthusiast awarded it 94 points, noting that it’s “full of tannins, richly textured and dense.” Wine Spectator likewise praised it as “a big red, with a focused, muscular profile packed with blackberry, tarragon and licorice notes.”

In the end, fearing for our lives during that morning drive was the best thing that happened to us on those the cliff-lined switchbacks, because all these months later—the rental Renault safely returned—we are finally able to share the Quinta do Ataide on this side of the Atlantic.