The Pantzers parlay Portugal

June 22: Mateus Palace

Remember when the wine du jour used to be Mateus Rose! Remember how the used Mateus bottles served to hold candles! Takes you back, doesn’t it ? ( you can still buy an empty original Mateus bottle for $15-20 on eBay!). The original label shows a magnificent palace, and that’s where we went today.

The Mateus palace comprises three primary buildings – a chapel, the winery built in the 16th century, and the manor built in the 18th century.

As our guide told us, it is not actually a real “palace” but the owner wanted to impress, so it looks like a palace and , as you can see from the picture , it has a lake in front of it to create a mirror reflection, so that it looked bigger than it actually was.

And it is not owned by the Mateus family. In fact, the iconic Mateus brand was founded by Portuguese producer, Sogrape and it is more than 80 years old.  The bottle was made shorter than other wines so that it would be placed at the front of any display and more visible, creating more sales (clever marketing!)

We were taken on a tour of the palace and the 17th to 20th century furniture and precious objects tell us about the life of the house, which was lived in by twelve successive generations of the same family until the Casa de Mateus Foundation was set up in 1970.

The gardens surrounding the Palace have a history of evolution and expansion.  Parts were initially planted in the 1700s, modified in the 1870s and further expanded in the 1930s .

Here’s the chapel and a couple of donkeys who I found when I took a wrong turn to get to the gardens!

We were taken to lunch at Quinta da Pacheca, a vineyard which produced the first red wine from the Duoro valley. We dined in the barrel room- very cool.

It had lovely grounds with beautiful views

June is a month of festivities with the “Popular Saints” celebrations in Portugal. We saw some of the festivities focused on Saint John.

The white blobs in the sky were actually fireworks to summon people to see a religious procession.