PORTO

Excellent classic and contemporary cuisine in unpretentious settings
Fine port and wine vineyards in the rolling Douro Valley

Porto was long thought of as being as old-world stuffy as the heavy red wine named after it. (Port was, after all, something Victorian gentlemen retired to drink after dinner while the ladies were left to themselves.) No more. Take Foz, for example: It was once a summer beach neighborhood for wealthy Portuguese at the point where the great Douro River meets the Atlantic. Now it teems with youthful life amid boutiques and innovative restaurants. From my first night's meal there at Foz Velha—quail eggs in cornbread; bacalao (salt cod) paired with tapenade and wrapped in a "nest" of thin, crisp potatoes—it's clear that the simple traditions of this Atlantic cuisine are being given a new zing. I've heard that the Portuguese have 365 ways of eating cod. The next day, I find a traditional counterpoint to the novelties of Foz Velha in simple but wonderful cod balls—a blend of the fish and potatoes—at a restaurant called Adega São Nicolau, in an alley near the waterfront of the old city. Just 363 to go…

The historic center of Porto rises steeply above the Douro waterfront, where the new mixes with delightful facets of the old—laundry hangs from the upper floors of chic new wine bars, tinny tunes waft out of the open windows of dilapidated facades. One morning, I see a granny in a flowery house dress listening to the radio in her ground-floor bedroom, the door flung wide, while a group of local hipsters have brunch in a modish restaurant next door. Snaking streets lead to tucked-away treasures: the narrow church of Ildefonso, lined with azulejos (traditional blue tiles); the somber Se Cathedral above the sea of rooftops.

The opposite side of the Douro belongs to port wine and its passionate followers. Hundreds of nineteenth-century brick warehouses sit on the hillsides above the river, forming an enclave known as Vila Nova da Gaia. After sampling various vintages on a tour of a cantina, I take a day-trip up the spectacular Douro River Valley, stopping off in Amarante, where a medieval village sits astride one of the river's tributaries. At Don Rodrigo, a wine shop on the town's single central alley, I sit at a wood table under hanging hams and, with a glass of crisp and slightly sparkling vinho verde, try a plate of fresh cheese that is, I discover by way of an embarrassing pantomime of various animal sounds (Portuguese is not easy to pick up in a jiffy), a mix of goat, cow, and sheep. It seems that, away from the coast, pork has replaced cod as the daily staple, and a plate of wafer-thin slices of smoked porco preto (a beloved species of local black pig) is the preferred lunch.

Less than an hour's drive from Porto, the landscape becomes severe, the gorge of the Douro deepens, and long, ancient schist terraces begin to snake the contours of the steep hillsides. Wine had been made here for two thousand years, but port has ruled for the past few centuries. After a white-knuckle drive through the vineyards high above Pinhão, I pull into the Quinta Nova to sample both wine and port. From the terrace, autumn descends in slow motion: Russet reds and golden yellows blush the low lines of vines for miles.