The showy white 2024 Guru has a perfumed nose with notes of spices, smoke and toast; it's balsamic and faintly medicinal/minty, with complex aromas that open to reveal complexity as it sits in the glass, citrus, herbal and floral, clean and intense. It has been produced since 2004 with old vines from the village of Porrais in a zone of transition from schist to granite, 18 micro plots of very old vines planted with a field blend of multiple varieties, mostly Viosinho, Rabigato, Códega do Larinho and Gouveio. It fermented in 225- and 500-liter French oak barrels, only 5% of them new, for eight weeks at low temperature, and it matured in barrels with bâtonnage for nine months. It's still young and undeveloped, a little marked by the wood, but it has a good track record for absorbing the wine and gaining in complexity. The wine reached 12.5% alcohol and kept a pH of 3.31 and 5.5 grams of acidity.

Husband and wife Jorge Serôdio and Sandra Tavares keep producing some of the finest whites from Douro and a collection of modern reds from over 40 hectares of vineyards. The whites were from 2023 and 2021 and the reds from 2022, cooler years for the whites and warmer for the reds.

I buy this wine every year personally and love it. While it has a real sense of white Burgundy, very Meursault-like, for me it has become a staple of the Douro Valley and the wine has made some major strides in pulling back on the oak a lot since the first vintage I had of the 2010. For me in the character of the wine's density and minerality, as well as the clean, precise fruit profile signify it's true terroir expression.

- One of the top white wines from the Douro
- A great lieu-dit Meursault always comes to mind when I taste this, salty, minerally, with some nut and precise citrus and orchard fruits.
- Restaurant PerSe in NYC, poured this by the glass as their answer for a White Burgundy
- Vines are 50 years old, granite and schiste soils
- 2 high elevation parcels in the northern Douro Valley mountaintops to preserve freshness and acidity
- A judicious 6 months in only 30% new French oak barrique, the rest used barrique and tonneau
- Equal parts 4 indigenous and important white grapes:
- Rabigato - Gouveio
- Viosinho - Codega do Larinho