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Across the Douro from Porto, Vila Nova de Gaia occupies a south-facing hillside that has shaped the taste of the world's wine cellars for centuries. The city's waterfront, the Cais de Gaia, stretches along the river beneath a skyline of terracotta rooftops and the painted signs of the great port wine lodges, many of which have stood here since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is one of those places where geography and commerce have conspired to produce something genuinely singular: the cool, humid air rolling off the Douro creates near-perfect conditions for ageing fortified wine, and the lodges, or caves, have never left.

The relationship between Gaia and port wine is not incidental. By Portuguese law, all port must be aged on this side of the river, which means that the long, barrel-vaulted cellars cut into the hillside beneath the city hold some of the most storied wine stocks in existence. Taylor's, founded in 1692 and one of the oldest British-founded port houses still in independent operation, sits among them. A self-guided tour of Taylor's Port Wine Cellar moves visitors through the history of the house and the mechanics of the trade, from the grape varieties grown upstream in the Douro Valley to the solera systems and vintage declarations that have made certain bottles collector's items. The tasting that follows is a practical education in the difference between a ruby, a tawny, and a late-bottled vintage, served in a lodge that has been doing exactly this for over three hundred years.