- Abraham Conlon/Adrienne Lo
- A Portuguese vineyard, Quinta do Infantado in the Douro
I recently interviewed wine retailer Craig Perman with a couple of other wine people for my podcast, and he mentioned that he had helped Fat Rice build a Portuguese-wine-based list—helped in the sense that he took Fat Rice owners Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo to Portugal for two weeks earlier this year to visit small producers and taste what would go well with their Portuguese-Macanese fusion cuisine. Portugal is the eleventh largest wine producer in the world, though that’s the kind of statistic that sounds good until you see how far behind their big three neighbors (France, Spain, and Italy) they really are.
But for us there is that inherent nature of the Portuguese wine style, especially in the north, that really lends itself to a lighter, lower in alcohol, refreshing wine. It’s not high alcohol—the reason you don’t want high alcohol is that high alcohol with spicy foods increases the perception of spice on the palate, it doesn’t wash it away. For me, sometimes the best part of the bite is that cleansing moment of the beverage, as you’re getting ready for the next bite.
- Abraham Conlon/Adrienne Lo
- Craig Perman, among the bottles
What was the atmosphere when you went to the winemakers in Portugal?
When you say Macau, they get it.
Well, terroir. Letting the land come through in the wine, and let it do what it do. I was kind of blown away in the Douro by how small, how stocky and resilient some of these vines were in this super-rocky soil. Instead of mass irrigation, they’d set up these buckets to catch and use the rain as much as possible. Not try to overfeed them with water.
