Text Ilkka Sirén

Seasons provide a wide range of opportunities to drink different kinds of wines. Here in Finland you can see what time of the year it is from what people are drinking. During Easter it’s mostly red wine and countries like Spain and Italy, especially the wines from Veneto like Valpolicella for example, are quite popular. If you see people guzzling cheap sparkling wine by the gallons on the streets and parks it’s probably 1st of May. In the beginning of summer rosé wines start to crawl out like a bunch of bear cubs who just finished hibernating.

When people begin to haul bag-in-box wines to their summer cottages it means midsummer is getting close. At the end of summer the rosé wines disappear as fast as they came and when the days start to get shorter people switch to full-bodied reds, probably from Chile or Argentina. Now, I might be exaggerating a bit but Finnish people are quite predictable when it comes to their drinking habits. To some extent I guess it’s pretty much the same all over the world.

As the four distinct seasons change so does the food we eat and the beverages we drink. One of the delicacies in Finland this time of the year is the burbot. You probably never heard of it but it’s a fish. It’s not the prettiest fish around, looks like a cross between a cod fish and an eel, but it’s definitely one of the most tasty ones. Burbot season is usually on during January and February. There is a couple ways of cooking it but the most famous is a classical burbot soup. You have to make sure to harvest its roe before throwing it in the pot. Burbot roe is very fine-grained and extremely tasty. Normally you eat it on a toast or blini with maybe some sour cream and onion. The drink of choice usually would be beer and schnapps but I went with white wine from the Douro.

Douro is still widely regarded as the land of port wine. If you had said twenty years ago that Douro could produce some amazingly fresh non-fortified white wines, most people would have though you are crazy. I have had my fare share of ups and downs with my love affair with the Douro valley and its wines. But every now and then I encounter wines that remind me why I fell in love with it in the first place. Such was the case with MAPA Douro Branco 2013 that I chose to drink with the burbot roe. MAPA comes from a place called Muxagata in the Douro Superior. The wine itself had less ripe tropical fruit aromas than I have come to expect from the Douro whites. More on the side of fresh citrus, spruce buds and a touch of pear. What really impressed me was the compact structure of the wine but still it had a certain lightness to it that carried the wine for a long and mouthwatering finish. It was a great match with the food and seemed to create a really positive buzz around the table, which is always a good thing.

With the main course, the soup, we had the MAPA Vinha dos Pais 2013. It’s pretty much a typical Douro blend with the usual suspects like Rabigato, Viosinho, Arinto and Gouveio. Fermented and aged in 500 liter oak barrels for 12 months. Both of these wines were 2013 but unlike the MAPA Branco this wine felt just way too young. With the food it performed quite well but without it the wine was a bit awkward. The oak wasn’t really integrated but it had a beautiful underlying minerality. I reckon even with just one more year in the bottle it could already be much more balanced. It’s just one of those things that we have to wait and see. After the magnificent purity of the first wine I was slightly disappointed. Mainly because the oak didn’t seem to fit in and instead of having a sort of seamless flavor profile it felt somewhat disjointed. I might have just caught it in a weird phase and will definitely retaste it in the future to see how it evolves.

Overall MAPA is a fantastic addition to the very exciting category of Douro Superior wines. I look forward drinking more of their wines and maybe someday visit them in Portugal, with or without the burbot.

Contacts
MAPA
Muxagata – Vila Nova de Foz Côa – Douro Superior
Urbanização Vila Campos, lote 40
5000-063 Vila Real
Tel: (+351) 259 374 155
Mobile: (+351) 938 537 914
E-mail: geral@mapavinhos.pt
Site: www.mapavinhos.pt