Porto’s 3 Most Sensuous Delights
Port. Fado. The Jesus laser light show
Those who know me would probably not describe me as an Epicurean — one who revels in the delights of the senses. My dear wife Teresa has done her best to school me in the fine arts of indulgence (for she is their mistress), but there’s a core of Protestant work ethic combined with time spent in a Buddhist monastery in my twenties that all too often leaves me twitching when pleasure for pleasure’s sake is the sole purpose of an activity.
This, I confess, is my weak spot as a flanêur. A flanêur, as I have come to understand my new vocation, devotes himself to the full range of experiences wherever he wanders. To experience any city to the fullest, one simply has to dive into the deep end of its pleasures — and do so without holding one’s nose!
Porto is a great place to indulge the senses, and Teresa had help setting an Epicurean agenda: our “foodie” friends Tom and Paula were with us for our first three days in the city. I love to play tour guide, and so went along gladly. I even led the way, to the most famous of Porto’s sensuous delights — a vintage port tasting.
Vintage Port
This was high on my three companions’ must-indulge list. Vintage port may seem a luxury to some — bottles can easily cost several hundred dollars, and a decent port tasting runs about $65, as did ours. But to me, it doesn’t seem so special, because I grew up in a house where vintage port was frequently splashed about. My father, Peter Ward, was the wine columnist for the Ottawa Citizen for thirty years, and he not only regularly served vintage port to guests after dinner, but year after year he generously bestowed bottles of the precious elixir as presents to his grown children. For most of my adult life, I have had more vintage port in my home than I could possibly drink.
I also grew up listening to my father’s stories of port and Porto, for he had been to the city for expert port tastings. I can recount the history of Port like a bedtime story I have heard a hundred times over. Basically, port wine was invented by the English by necessity. Britain is too cold for vineyards, and the English were often at war with France. So they needed a reliable, non-French source of quality wine, and they found it in Portugal’s Douro Valley. Treaties with Portugal cemented the trade, but shipping a delicate product like wine all the way to London by sea proved difficult. So, to better preserve the wine, British merchants added brandy to it, to increase the alcohol content, and thus prevent it from spoiling.
As I recall from my father, the original plan was that the fortified mixture was to be diluted back to wine strength when it reached England, but when the British tried the stuff straight off the boat, they said: “ ‘ang on a minute — I rather like it like that!” And the rest is history.
In fact, the British liked port so much that they became staunch allies with the Portuguese. Through centuries of European wars, the British always supported Portugal — with one unfortunate exception, after they helped fend off Napoleon’s invasion of their ally, the Brits temporarily seized direct control of Porto — relinquishing it back to the Portuguese only with guarantees the flow of port to English shores would not be further disrupted.
So, with all that weight of history heavy on my shoulders, I joined my friends and beloved spouse for a tasting at Kopke, the oldest port maker in Porto. We split two vintage tastings of 5 glasses each between the four of us, which was a good call, not only for the price tag, as the before and after photos illustrate…
What I loved about this tasting was that they gave us two tawny ports, two vintage whites, and a young 2018 ruby port for comparison. I won’t go into all the details of the differences, but I will say that typically tawny ports age best. What makes a port tawny is that the wine is allowed to age longer in the barrel, exposing it to more oxygen, which turns it reddish brown. But this also allows more flavors from the seasoned oak into the wine, flavors that then mature in the bottle over decades. We sampled a 40-year-old tawny and a single-year 1966 that was older than Paula!
What did they taste like? Well…I’m terrible at this. As I write, more than a week has passed since we visited Kopke. Apparently, I have no memory cells in my tongue. But I can’t write about a port tasting without telling you, loyal readers, how the wines tasted, can I? So I asked Teresa what she remembered:
“I remember after tasting the first tawny, which had a typical soft-caramel flavor, the ‘66 was so very different. It was a shot of strong caramel that hit you right in the back of the throat, and then your mouth filled with spices, vanilla and intense apricot. What I liked about the ruby was that while most ruby ports are so sweet, it’s hard to drink a lot, but this one was surprisingly different. It didn’t coat your tongue with sugar. It was light and fruity — cherry and blackberry. Bright. Tim, I remember you said it was almost like a cross between regular red wine and a ruby port.”
“I said that?… Okay, what about the white ports?”
“The older white port was almost like a tawny, caramelly, so not so distinctive. But the younger, the 2005, was more like honey, with lots of light fruits coming through — plum and peach.”
Gobsmacked at Teresa’s total taste recall, I took notes. So, that’s what it’s like to be an Epicurean.
Fado
Fado is the Portuguese Blues. Born in the slums of Lisbon, Fado emerged at the end of the 19th Century as the music of the urban working class. In the 20th Century, it became a singular expression of Portuguese culture and of the uniqueness of the Portuguese people. Fado made its way to global fame and recognition, including — you guessed it — onto the UNESCO Intangible World Heritage list (click the UNESCO link for a 10-minute mini-documentary).
The word fado means “fate” or “destiny,” and indeed, Fado songs are most often about love lost, separation, or chances for happiness missed. At the heart of Fado is the emotion saudade, a Portuguese word that every online site says defies translation into English. Teresa — who is Portuguese — says that “longing” comes the closest.
“It’s not nostalgia, though,” she tells me. “Not simple sadness in the face of loss. It’s a deep, deep feeling you have connecting you to what you long for, and that can be anything — a lost friend or lover, a place, a dream for your future.”
Just across the street from our guest house in Porto was a one-hour, pre-dinner Fado show for tourists. I’ve been to a couple of shows with Teresa on previous trips to Portugal, but this would be Tom and Paula’s only chance. I was lucky enough to be passing by the entrance an hour before the show, just as the venue was opening. It was fully booked, but the manager, Miguel (who is also one of the musicians), said he would add some extra chairs and squeeze the four of us in. This kindness is typical of the friendly Portuguese, even in a big city.
Honestly, we expected a performance dumbed down for the tourists. Most Fado shows are late-night affairs, with the best singers performing in the wee hours. But, the trio who took the stage at 6:30 p.m. impressed even Teresa. The singer, Ana Margarita, dressed in traditional black lace, filled the room with her passionate vibrato (“She’s professionally trained,” Teresa whispered to me).
Ana Margarita explained to us early in the show that it didn’t matter that the audience did not understand the meaning of the Portuguese lyrics, “because, in Fado, it is the depth of my heart that sings to the depth of your heart.”
Teresa was able to pass along to the three of us the gist of some of the songs during the show: In one, the singer was jealous of the wind, because it could touch the hair of her absent lover, away at sea. In another, a Fado singer falls in love with a handsome man in the audience one night; every night after that, for the rest of her career, she sings and looks longingly for his face, but he never comes back.
Notice in the pictures that all three performers have their eyes closed. They did not look at the audience during the performance. They perform from a deep place inside, where saudade exists, releasing it like a bird in a cage with each song.
Miguel, who played the unique Portuguese guitar and acted as emcee, also told the audience that Fado musicians take their cue from the singer. They never know until she tells them on stage what song she will choose to sing next, nor what key she may ask them to play it in. He told us that in Fado, the music has a name, and the lyrics have a different name. So the singer will ask for a tune in a specific key, but then she will choose whichever set of lyrics she wants to sing with that particular melody. This adds a level of improvisation on stage and requires a hell of a lot of versatility from the musicians.
When the performance was over and the lights turned up, I looked to my beloved and saw tears streaming down her face. One of the amazing things about Teresa is how tough she is. She can hold it together in the most difficult circumstances. She’s not sentimental, and even when in pain, she does not shed a tear. But Fado reaches the saudade in her, and it fills me with a kind of awe. Yes, of course, I found it moving. But Teresa was touched and opened, as perhaps only a Portuguese can be.
When I contemplate Fado as an expression of saudade, I think it captures the power and dignity the ordinary individual can find within themselves when crushed by fate. Yes, the young fisherman you love is lost at sea. Alas, you will never see your home again. Of course, the woman you love has left you for another man. You can endure — and this is the important part — endure without hardening yourself. Without cutting off your feelings. Instead of being broken by your fate, your feelings can break you open. In that breaking, an incredible beauty is revealed. Isn’t this the revolution Fado brought to Portugal? The workers, the peasants and sailors, the entertainers, they all had the beauty in their souls laid bare by fate. That soul — it doesn’t need to be a theological or metaphysical entity — but it shines forth with as much right to dignity as the souls of priests and nobles and kings.
The Jesus Laser Light Show
The sacred art of Porto’s churches and cathedrals is absolutely overwhelming. In some, like the Cathedral of São Francisco, constructed in 1425, the entire baroque interior is sculpted with angels and saints and then covered with gold. It was hard for me to get past the sheer gaudiness as if the churches were flaunting their bling in an ostentatious display of wealth and power. Ah, my Protestant upbringing is showing up again!
But as a flanêur, I had to put such judgements aside and try to feel the best intentions of the people who designed and built and funded these houses of God. And I got it: the interiors are meant to provide a glimpse of heaven. All the gold is merely to induce a sense of awe, to transport the worshipper, to the otherworldly holy realm. And that which is most holy in heaven is not the gold, but that which surrounds it: Christ on the Cross, the Suffering of Mary, the Martyrdom of the Saints. And boy oh boy, do the Portuguese like their icons bloody.
And so suffering is the path through which mortal souls may find their way to that golden heaven. But wow, has suffering ever fallen out of fashion these days as a pathway to paradise. Porto’s grand churches have become little more than museums. They sell entry tickets to the tourists, who wander through them, taking pictures, even during the sparsely-attended services.
One of the most impressive churches of Porto, Clérigos, has even been converted into the setting of a laser sound and light show called Spiritus. I found out about it because I wanted to climb the church tower for the view, and so I saw the flyer. I was appalled. Church as Imax Theater! I picked up their brochure and read: “…an unsettling multimedia show that transcends the wall of the most emblematic church of the city…” I hated this! I read on simply to fuel my sense of outrage until I came across a note about the show being inspired by the poem by Portuguese poet Alvàros de Campos:
In the end, the best way of traveling is to feel
To feel everything in every way
To feel it all excessively…
The light show, thrown upon the interior walls of the sanctuary follows the stanzas of the poem, “where the concept of being is translated into the union of the individual with the outside world.” God dammit, if this is not going straight to the heart of what it means to me to be a flanêur! Now I knew had to see the stupid show. Tom and Paula had left the city. Teresa said she was tired and wanted a break that evening, so I set off to indulge my senses all on my own. I bought a ticket and entered the darkened church, a complete skeptic.
The show began. Spiritus’ computer-generated images and shapes are mapped perfectly onto the contours of the church interior, so that the walls and domed ceiling seem not just a screen, but appear to be radiating with flowing, pulsing images and multicoloured lights, while everything is suffused in loud, emotive music that pulses in time with the changing kaleidoscopes of color. You can watch this short video which gives you a feel for the experience, but not really, because to sit within the church is to be engulfed, lost in the waves of light and color and sound. It was…transporting.
Water cascaded down from the ceiling in blue rivulets, splashing off the columns. Embers swirled up the walls into a vortex of fire in the black night sky of the dome overhead. A storm of flower petals flew past on the wall, and green waves of northern lights rippled across the ceiling, almost exactly as I remembered a night with the real northern lights from long ago. It was intoxicating, overwhelming, and exhilarating, to lose oneself completely in the flow of brilliant images.
I remember surfacing briefly during the show and thinking, damn, if the Catholic church had invented this technology 100 years ago, the pews would be full in the 21st Century. People would clamber to attend services because this would bring them that sense of awe that the gilt walls once gave to the people. I felt tears in my eyes with the final spectacular visualization of the last stanza, Renewal (here translated into English):
I am a great tangle of forces imbued with the infinite
tending in every direction towards everywhere in space,
Life, that enormous thing, is what holds all of me together,
and keeps all the forces that rage within me.
I felt awakened as if I was watching the universe unfold before my eyes. After, when I stumbled outside, I could hardly adjust my vision to the narrow streets of the old city once again. Everything was exactly as it was before I entered the church, but nothing seemed the same. I wandered around aimlessly. I felt dazed and dizzy, but happy. For I had experienced Porto to excess.
