Bairrada

Bairrada is the small, Atlantic-battered DOC in central Portugal that Baga calls home, and the two are so bound together that describing one is describing the other. Squeezed between Coimbra and Aveiro a short drive from the ocean, it is cool, damp and rainy by Portuguese standards, and its heavy clay and clay-limestone soils ripen the late, thick-skinned Baga slowly and incompletely. The result is a dry red of deep colour, very high acidity and firm tannin at only moderate alcohol — red and black berry and plum wrapped in coffee, hay, tobacco and woodsmoke — famously austere in youth and famously long-lived, which is why Baga is so often compared to Nebbiolo and its wines to Barolo. Bairrada is also Portugal's sparkling-wine heartland, and its own kitchen produced the dish that explains the wine: leitão, roast suckling pig.