Quinta do Vallado Wine Hotel

Quinta do Vallado appears in the records in 1716, which makes it one of the older estates in the Douro, and it has stayed in the same family throughout. The family is the one descended from Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira, the 19th-century widow who became the most formidable figure in the history of Portuguese wine. Her descendants still run it, now in the sixth generation, and the winemaking consultant is another cousin from Quinta do Vale Meão.

The estate sits on both banks of the Corgo, a tributary of the Douro, a few kilometres from Peso da Régua, with 70 hectares of vineyard here and thirty more of certified organic vines further upriver.

The hotel came in stages and the stages are visible. Five suites occupy the ochre-washed 18th-century manor house, the same colour that appears on the wine labels, furnished traditionally with high ceilings and thick walls. Eight rooms sit in a wing added in 2012 by the architect Francisco Vieira de Campos, built from local schist and deliberately dark, sleek and modern against the old house. Six more are in the Eira suites. Nineteen keys in total, and the three groups are so different that it is worth choosing rather than leaving it to chance.

There is a pool set among the vines, a restaurant working with estate produce, and a wine cellar where grapes move by gravity rather than pumps and fermentation happens in temperature-controlled steel.

The estate runs tastings across its full range, from rosé and table wines to the ports, plus vineyard walks, cycling, fishing on the Douro, cooking classes and picnics. It is a serious wine tourism operation rather than a hotel with a token tasting, and it has the awards to show for it.

Peso da Régua is a few minutes away with its train station and the Douro Museum. Porto is around an hour and a half by car.