Portuguese white wine and salted cod is a match made in heaven

Symington Mendes Contacto Alvarinho, Vinho Verde, Portugal 2023 (from £16, thewinesociety.com; thesolentcellar.co.uk) Portugal’s most famous white grape variety owes its renown to the canny marketeers who work with it on the other side of the country’s northern border with Spain. Albariño, as it’s known in Galicia’s Rías Baixas (source of most bottles of the variety in the UK and elsewhere), is alvarinho in Portugal’s Vinho Verde. However it’s spelt, this recently fashionable grape variety is responsible for a fair amount of rather humdrum, indeterminately fruity, if perfectly drinkable, dry white wine. But in the right hands, whether Spanish or Portuguese, it is also capable of making wines that combine a refreshing salted citrus raciness with subtle but evocative notes of wild flowers and herbs and succulent ripe white peachiness. One of the finest Portuguese exponents of alvarinho is Anselmo Mendes, a winemaker born and bred in Monçao, the area of Vinho Verde that is the variety’s traditional heartland. For the immaculate, scintillating Contacto he teams up with the Symington family, a noted producer of Port and table wines in the Douro, for a wine that was born for bacalhau.