Wine Tasting, Cork Harvest and the end of the Adventure

I can't believe this adventure is ending!  Today was my last day, marked at the start by my pre-flight covid test (negative, thank you).  After that sigh of relief, and being on foot instead of in a car, I went to a couple of shops in Evora to taste wine.  One of the vineyards I drove by yesterday, Ervidiera, gave me a selection of white wines, one red and a dessert wine to taste.  I did buy some of their wine to bring home, having made some room in my suitcase for it.  At the other shop, I bought a Quinta de Quitzal Guadalupe 2019 red wine to drink tonight with friends I'd met earlier in the trip who were here in Evora now.  The Alentejo  wines I tried were every bit as good and reasonably priced as I'd heard.

I decided after 2 frugal months of travel to have a guide show me around the cork farm and cork industry this afternoon.   My guide (@evoralocaltours on Instagram) works for a cork farm and we began our tour talking about the soil first, progressing through the millennia to how the Alentejo Region developed and why the cork oak and holm oak grow here.  One thing I hadn't noticed before was how relatively short aged oak trees are here -- but the soil is thin and the root systems of Portugal's oaks can only support so much top growth. 

The guide explained the number system marking trees to show what year the bark was last stripped to ensure that the trees were not stripped again for at least 9 years.   And then we looked at the piles of tree parts being sorted -- that top photo is stacked sections of stripped cork -- as all the parts of trees that are stripped or pruned get used in some way.

The tree pieces can end up as wine corks, once the stripped cork is boiled to kill bacteria and sorted for quality; thinner pieces can be made into sheets of bark used to make bulletin boards or cork tiles or disks; even lesser quality/smaller sections of cork can be ground and then made into disks or acoustic tiles and the like.   The wood chunks from pruned tree sections are burned to make charcoal.  Wine stoppers are punched out of the high quality boiled planks of cork and then are aged for 2 years before being used in wine bottles.  A machine does the compressing that forces the cork into a bottle, but up to that point, it's mostly hand-done work.

And that, as far as touring goes, is a wrap.  I will be painting, taking my sketches and notes and gathering them into works to frame or use as reference for new works, pretty much nonstop between when I get home and when my show opens at Gallery B on May 4 (reception will be May 6), 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda MD.  The show will be open for the month of May!  I hope to see you there!

A few notes from my travels.  I got a Portuguese SIM card to put into my unlocked iPhone and it definitely saved me a lot of phone costs over using Verizon's travel plan, but it also completely messed up anything that required two-factor authentication.  When I really needed it, I had to swap out my SIM card (which I got very good at doing quickly, like in the garden at the Alcazar in Spain where my Portuguese sim card didn't work).  I can't say there isn't a better option out there, as I hear using the Google Fi international phone plan may be it.  

I never once felt unsafe on this trip, which may have to do as much with the low crowd levels in Europe this winter as the fact that I went out at night exactly once in two months.  I also carried a purse, but it never had my wallet in it, just in case.  And speaking of those low crowds -- I loved everything I did on this trip but I'm sure the experience would have been very different during summer months or high tourist seasons whenever they are.

I brought my headphones but had no need for them.  I also brought a portable speaker but I listened to music once when I was cooking but enjoyed the peace and quiet more than I would have enjoyed the music.

English is spoken almost everywhere on the coasts/big cities.  I ran into communication problems in a few interactions in Evora and in the markets with fishermen.  After two months, I still can't match what people say in Portuguese to the words written, say, on a menu and the Portuguese know it!

Some things are ridiculously inexpensive, like when you get coffee and a pastry for breakfast and it's 1.20 euros.  Other things, like putting fuel in a car are way more expensive than in the US (for future reference, Portugal, I'm told, gets its oil from Algeria, so it's not dependent as so much of Europe on Russian oil).  I would say that food is pretty comparable in restaurants to US prices.

I brought a tripod for my phone camera and never used it.  I brought a car phone holder thingy that was really hugely helpful in letting me see the phone instead of just listening to directions.   The Google maps directions counted the number of exits from a roundabout incorrectly often enough ("take the 2nd exit to stay on ...") that it was really important to see where to go.  In fact, I'd say overall that Google maps and roundabouts are not a match made in heaven.  The "exit the roundabout now" was often said pretty much at a time when if I wasn't already on my way out of the roundabout, we'd be rerouting because I missed it.

Next year, I hope to do this again.  And those of you who said you wished you could come?  Do it!  Join me.  Planning starts... in August.