Issue No: 2 Lisbon, PT

Dirk Niepoort is one of the most consequential winemakers in Portugal — the Dutch-descended Oporto négociant who spent thirty years quietly proving that the Douro Valley could make dry table wines as serious as its Port. Redoma Branco is his argument, made from old-vine Rabigato, Codega do Larinho, and Viosinho grown at altitude in the schist soils of the upper Douro. It arrives golden and textured, with a mineral tension that comes from the rock and an aromatic complexity that has no business being in a bottle at this price point.

The Douro built its reputation on fortified wine and spent decades being dismissed as too hot and too rough for serious dry table production. Niepoort spent those same decades proving otherwise, and Redoma is the wine that convinced the European wine press he was right. Drink it the way the Portuguese drink their best whites — cold but not frigid, with anything from the sea. The 2021 has the freshness of a cooler vintage and will age beautifully for another five years if you can leave it alone.

Find it through Skurnik Wines or Broadbent Selections in the US, both of which import Niepoort with reasonable distribution. Expect to pay $35–48 depending on your market. The 2019 is also worth seeking out for something with more bottle age. If Redoma is unavailable, Quinta do Crasto’s white is made in a similar register and is often easier to source.

Lisbon’s morning is conducted standing up. Locals have breakfast at a pastelaria counter — a bica, which is shorter and stronger than an Italian espresso and doesn’t apologise for it, and a pastel de nata, the custard tart that has been eaten at counters exactly like this one for longer than most countries have existed. The correct way to do this is to stand at the counter, not sit at a table. Order without pointing at a menu. Pay without being asked. This is breakfast in Lisbon and it costs under €2 and it is one of the small perfect things.

The neighbourhood most visitors never reach: Mouraria, directly below Alfama and older than it by several centuries. It is the most ethnically mixed neighbourhood in the city, full of small restaurants serving food that has never been adjusted for foreign palates, and almost entirely absent from the tourist infrastructure. The Saturday market at Campo de Ourique is where the city’s food community does its weekly shopping — chefs on their day off, wine importers, the people who run the best restaurants in the city buying the same produce you can buy. Go on a Saturday morning and eat your way through it.

The single thing tourists consistently get wrong: the tram. The famous yellow Tram 28 is tourist infrastructure at this point — a slow-moving queue through the city’s most photographed streets, packed beyond capacity, operated primarily for the benefit of people who have read that it is a characterful way to see Lisbon. Locals take Uber or walk. Walk from Príncipe Real down through Chiado into Alfama and you cover two hundred metres of elevation, four distinct neighbourhoods, and more of what Lisbon actually is than any tram ride will show you.

The thing that makes you feel like you’ve crossed a threshold: finding a tasca with no menu. Not a wine bar, not a restaurant — a tasca, which is a different category entirely. A room with four tables, a handwritten list of two or three things on a chalkboard, and someone’s grandmother cooking them. These places exist throughout the city and are almost never listed anywhere. You find them by walking slowly through neighbourhoods that tourists haven’t found yet and looking for doors that are open at lunchtime and smell like garlic and olive oil. When you find one, eat whatever they tell you to eat.