Van Zellers Journeys:
Sea Change
12 August, 2024
Sea change noun. 1. archaic: a change brought about by the sea. 2. a profound or notable transformation.
T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock famously measured out his life with coffee spoons. An apt unit of time for a lonely urbanite, sure. But when it comes to quantifying my summer in Portugal, an alternative, more convivial unit is more apt: glasses of wine.
There were jammy, garnet-hued glugs of Herdade Do Mouchão during the Alentejo harvest, soles of my feet stained from treading freshly harvested grapes. Or the volcanic whites of Pico, their smokiness and salinity speaking of the Atlantic winds and eruptions that shaped this Azorean island, where indigenous Verdelho vines are cradled in terraces of jet-black basalt. Or deep in the Douro Valley, precious drops of rare tawny ports served from the barrel by Cristiano Van Zellers (the oldest dated from 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected). Over those months, friendships were forged, plans galvanised, fears confessed, hopes restored – inevitably, over wine.
Portugal and I had gotten off to a rocky start, though. Back in October 2021, I’d landed in Lisbon at midnight to make a grand romantic gesture for my then-partner, who was on a business trip in the capital. Spoiler alert: it didn’t go to plan. In fact, my heart was broken in the lobby of the Four Seasons. I suppose there are worse places it could’ve happened. At least there was a plump, velvet-covered sofa to sink into as the truth crystallised. The imagined future evaporated into the strained, air-conditioned space between us. The chandelier, glaring too brightly, seemed to press its entire weight down on my chest. The lofty marble lobby suddenly struck me as mausoleum. And surely, I was dying, wasn’t I?
Only, a couple of days later, there I was, pulling into Porto’s São Bento Station, walking beneath the soaring steel arches of Dom Luis Bridge, inhaling the briny Atlantic breeze along Vila Nova de Gaia’s waterfront. Who knows why I’d chosen to catch the train north – perhaps a need to keep moving, or because I’d never been to this particular city before, or simply the fact that now I could go anywhere at any time without telling anyone. So, I walked. Past houses painted in rainbow stripes or covered in tiles the colour of pastel da nata.
Outside one restaurant, a woman was flinging squid onto the coals with impressive ferocity, scowling into shimmering heat. I pulled up a plastic chair, ordered sardines, which arrived grilled with wedges of lemons, a juicily ripe tomato salad and boiled potatoes swimming in garlic butter. ‘And some wine, senhorinha?’ Yes, what a good idea. The carafe of very cold, crisp vinho verde cut through the salt-crusted, blackened fish skin. I turned my face up to the sky, blue as an azulejo tile, and for the first time in days, smiled. Everything was going to be okay. Because if I could be content there, in that moment, then happiness could happen again and again and again.
Here’s what I remember. Carrying glasses of Joáo Pato’s sparkling, salmon-coloured Bairrada into Praça das Flores at dusk, while a saxophonist plays beside the fountain, and everyone watches each other circling in the sultry air. We chose wines, unashamedly, for the quirkiness of their labels – perhaps a wild boar (Crazy Javali) or a skull-and-crossbones (Pirata da vaiuva) or a nun (Il Ceo). And as Londoners, we were astounded how Portuguese wine bars let us sample four or five different varieties before settling on which we wanted – such hospitality!
Driving to a seafood shack in Famalicão Nazaré for my first taste of percebes. Perilous to harvest (fishermen scale steep cliffs with ropes to reach the goose barnacles), their appearance is part dinosaur’s claw, part elephant’s leg. My companions – a motley crew comprising an actor, a vintner, a designer – demonstrate how to snap off the top of the shell and prise out the clam-like slivers of meat. Though unlovely to look at, the flavour smacks of the sea. A bottle of buttery Van Zellers & Co VZ Douro Branco 2017 is uncorked. Platters of oysters and mussels keep coming. The name, they tell me, is pronounced per-se-besh, which also means “He/she understands.” Well, I was starting to.
Jantar debaixo dos limoeiros do Paço da Glória, uma casa senhorial no Minho. A cera a acumular-se à volta das velas e as garrafas de vinho vazias a estampar formas arredondadas cor-de-rosa na toalha de linho, enquanto eu falava com um grupo de estranhos sobre o luto – Não é que ele surge em momentos tão estranhos e inesperados? E não é sombrio quando se tinha uma relação difícil com a pessoa que faleceu? É uma alegria poder dizer coisas que a minha própria família, limitada pela famosa reserva britânica, não aceitaria à mesa de jantar.
Dining beneath the lemon trees at Paco da Gloria, a manor house in Minho. Wax pooling around candle stumps and empty wine bottles stamping pink crescents onto the linen tablecloth as I talk with a group of strangers about grief – Doesn’t it strike at such odd, unanticipated moments? Isn’t it murky when you had a strained relationship with the person who passed away? – giddy at being able to say things that my own family, hampered by that notorious British reserve, wouldn’t welcome at the dinner table.
Scuba diving from Sines harbour to explore Ecoalga’s underwater wine cellar. Tiny marine creatures have left their lacework over the bottles. Apparently, wines age faster down here than back on terra firma, gently rocked by the current in the cool dark depths. A phrase drifts into my mind: sea-change. The first recorded mention is in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange.” Ariel’s Song is about a drowned king, but the expression’s come to mean either a change brought about by the sea, or more broadly, a profound or notable transformation of any kind. Back at the surface, bobbing on the grey-green waves, I stretch my fingers wide, no longer clinging onto broken things like a shipwrecked soul. There’s some relief, after all, in releasing, in being adrift, alone. Precious things had been wrenched from my grip; let them settle on the seabed like a treasure chest.
So many of the people I met in Portugal had undergone their own sea-changes. The lawyer turned award-winning cheesemaker Joana Garcia. A former freediver who’d retrained as a death doula. All the women who’d one day decided to move themselves from South Africa or Australia or Brazil to this corner of Europe – because they wanted to, because they could.
Of course, those months had low points, too. And I won’t miss being driven from bed each morning by the sound of drilling and stifling heat – sleep deprived, head pounding, throat parched – because our third-floor apartment, for all its beautifully curated bookshelves and antique tiles and enviable Principe Real location, turned out to a veritable furnace and backed onto a construction site.
Mostly, however, that summer was a series of gilded, glass-measured moments. I took my medicine – laughter, sunlight, wine – and felt braver than before.
