Every year, the DWWA summons the great and good of global wine to a kind of diplomatic summit in a blindfold. Judges sniff, sip, and stare into the void of excellence until the wines speak enough to be crowned among the 50 “Best in Show.” That’s 0.3% of 18,000 entries, which makes it quite more difficult than passing through Lisbon Airport passport control in under 20 minutes.
Portugal, naturally, brought five bottles to the altar of greatness this year. Each one is proof that behind every world-class wine is a committee, a spreadsheet, and probably a Touriga Nacional vine held together with dental floss and granite.
Quinta Do Reguengo, Cortes, Douro, 2020
40% Touriga Nacional, 30% Tinta Roriz, 30% Touriga Franca | 14.5% alcohol
This wine doesn’t walk into a room—it colonizes it. Brooding, muscular, and oddly suave, it’s a Douro red that wears its 14.5% like a tailored overcoat. The blend hits all the classics, which means you’re getting three generations of Douro DNA smashed into one bottle like a family reunion with better lighting. It’s dark. It’s structured. It smells like forest ambition and tastes like black fruit diplomacy. Definitely a food wine—but not the kind you sip with chips and Netflix. This one wants roast meat, linen, and some form of national anthem playing quietly in the background.
Santos & Seixo Wines, Da Casa Grande Reserva, Douro 2020
50% Touriga Nacional, 30% Touriga Franca, 10% Sousão | 14% alcohol
This bottle is the Douro turned up to eleven. It’s inky, dramatic, and packed with so much fruit it borders on jam-band territory—but in a good way. The winemaking restraint keeps things just shy of psychedelic. There’s structure here: incense-like oak, slightly bitter edges, and a back-palate that feels like a polite slap from a leather glove. Compared to its sibling from Reguengo, this is the louder, moodier cousin who shows up late but leaves early and makes sure everyone remembers it. A wine that haunts—in the most flattering way possible.
Soalheiro, Alvarinho, Monção e Melgaço, Vinho Verde 2024
100% Alvarinho | 12.5% alcohol
This is what happens when Vinho Verde stops pretending to be innocent. Yes, it’s Alvarinho. Yes, it’s from granite-soaked northern Portugal. But forget the usual porch-wine clichés. This is cut-glass elegance with a quiet superiority complex. There’s no sugar coating, no perfumed tricks—just texture, poise, and enough minerality to make your teeth remember where they’ve been. It’s a wine that doesn’t try to impress, and therefore absolutely does. Perfect with food, or with silence.
Graham’s, Quinta dos Malvedos, Single Quinta Vintage Port 2018
50% Touriga Franca, 30% Touriga Nacional, 10% Sousão | 20% alcohol
Imagine standing on a Douro hillside at dusk after a drought-ravaged year, holding a glass that smells like thunder. That’s this Port. Vintage 2018 was a gamble—a heatwave-fueled fever dream saved by a spring flood—and Malvedos turned it into a velvet wrecking ball of fruit, herbs, and darkness. It’s lush, but not sweet; strong, but not loud. It broods. It simmers. It waits. The tannins are firm but kind, the spirit is seamlessly tucked in, and the whole thing unfolds like a novel you didn’t know you’d already started. Give it time—or don’t. Either way, you’re in.
Menin Douro Estates, 50 Year Old Tawny Port NV
20% Tinta Barroca, 20% Touriga Franca, 20% Tinta Amarela | 20% alcohol
Fifty years is a long time to sit in wood and think about your life. This tawny Port has done just that—and come out the other side dressed in walnut and whispering riddles. It’s a slow-burn kind of luxury: all tobacco leaf, dusty florals, and the suggestion of expensive leather gloves somewhere in the room. So smooth it’s practically incorporeal, the wine doesn’t brag about its age, it simply radiates it—like a well-read ghost in a Lisbon townhouse. Sip it late, with dessert or memory.
