Mateus Rosé

Remember Mateus Rosé, that classy wine of the 1970s with the distinctive bottle, which had a lovely shape and a label showing a beautiful Portuguese Palacio?

It was one of the drinks of the 1970s and the bottle was a familiar sight around the world. It might have looked better with a candle in it, rather than in front of you on the table in a restaurant but I thought it was really sophisticated. Therefore when I first (tried to) impress Dawn in 1977, we had dinner in the Castle Hotel at Castleton and we drank Mateus Rosé.
So it’s not surprising therefore that we visited Mateus when we were staying in Vila Real. The village is just up the road from the town and the Palacio de Mateus is easy to find.
The building is very impressive and here’s Dawn, for some reason making a Lady Di pose (but please don’t read anything into that).

No-one seems to care about the statue although there’s a photo somewhere in the palace displays, that shows the figure in a more appropriate pose.
There’s an enormous yew hedge in the palace garden and we were fortunate to visit when it was being cut - so there’s some scale on the photo. Inside the hedge it’s even more dramatic.

What we had really come to see was the vineyard where our 1970’s bottle of rosé had originated. We were very disappointed to find that none of the bottles in the shop had that distinctive shape and eventually asked why. Before we had even finished asking the question the answer started to be given and you can see that it has been asked thousands of times.
It seems that “our” Mateus Rosé” doesn’t come from the vineyard at the Palacio de Mateus at all. In the 1940s the rights to the picture were bought by another village vineyard and it is they that use the image on the bottle. So bottle and palace are nothing more than a commercial link.
How disappointing - furthermore the woman behind the Palacio de Mateus counter said that they refer to that wine as "pink coke”. So much for my sophisticated taste in 1978.