Too late: Wine Blogging Wednesday#38

Alas, Wine Blogging Wednesday # 38 was last week! We had the dates wrong and now are too late for Catavino to include our posting in the round-up. But we did try two Portuguese table wines last Sunday, and we don’t want to withhold you the results.
My husband cooked a nice Jamie Oliver stew, the one for Andy the gasfitter (from Jamie’s Dinners), to go with a wine from the Alentejo and a wine from the Douro. The Alentejo wine, Dignitas Reserva 2001 is made by a Dutchman who lives in Portugal, Herman van Beuningen. The Douro one is one of our favourites: Meio Queijo 2004 from Johnny Graham’s Churchill Graham Company.

Both wines combined rather well with the stew (veal, carrots, chick peas, tomatoes, potatos), but the Meio Queijo was the more lively one. The wine livened up the stew very well. A short tasting note for the Meio Queijo 2004: ruby red colour, young and creamy in the nose, vanilla, lots of red fruit, a simple but pleasant wine for stews and other rustic cooking.
The Dignitas 2001 was a more ‘dignified’ wine. The age difference was also noticeable. This wine did not combine as well as the first one with the simple stew; it is more a good wine for sipping by the fire.

Johnny Graham’s red Douro table wines have a special meaning to us. A couple of years ago, in May 2003, our family of four spent a spring holiday in the Douro region. Since our regular wine merchant is the exclusive importer in the Netherlands for Churchill port wines, and since those are our favorite and we met Johnny Graham at a tasting, we very much wanted to pay a visit to the Churchill lodge in Villa Nova da Gaia. We had an invitation from Johnny Graham to call him when we were in the neighbourhood, so that is what we did.
Arriving at the lodge, the kids were parked in the office of a secretary with comic books, paper and crayons, and we received the grand tour. The highlight of the tour was a tasting in the blending room, with magnificent views over the river Douro and the city of Oporto. We tasted single quinta ports that were not yet on the market and a table wine that was going to be released later that year! It was not the first year Churchill made table wines, but we still thought of it as a great privilege. We have cherished the memory of that visit ever since and have drunk the Churchill Estates red table wines several times after.

At that time the Meio Queijo was not yet in existence. A year or so later, at a tasting, our wine merchant introduced a second table wine from the company, called Vinha do Meio Queijo. It was developed especially for the Dutch market. Since Johnny Graham is a great lover of Dutch cheese, he had given the new wine an appropriate name: meio queijo translates as half a cheese! The Meio Queijo is a simpler wine than the Churchill Estates, but also very good and very much a wine for every day. And compared to the price of a lot of non-European red wines, the Meio Queijo with its € 5,75 holds up very well. We prefer this one to wines from further afield (Australia, South Africa). Furthermore, they have that extra meaning to us that makes wine so special: they have a history with the maker ánd in our family now!