Made from a jumble of little-known grape varieties in the northern corner of Portugal, this wine can be either white or red, though most of what comes to the U.S. is white. It’s something crisp to go with summertime clams, crabs, lobsters, and shrimp.

Background
One of the least-known, least-fashionable white wines in the American marketplace, this "green wine" is called such because the Portuguese habit is to drink it when it's super-young, or metaphorically, when it’s green. Nothing that costs four bucks a bottle will ever be fashionable.

Shopper’s Tips

• Find last year’s vintage. Many of the Vinho Verdes on American wine shop shelves are not as young as they should be, which means they won't have the bracing freshness they should. In summer 2003, you should be drinking Vinho Verde from the 2002 vintage.

• Look for a bottling date. On the back of the bottle is a serial number, followed by a slash, then a date. That date tells you the year in which the wine was bottled. The wine is always bottled after January--so if the number reads 349871/2001, it means that you have a wine from the 2000 vintage that was bottled in 2001.

• Go for dry and sparkling. In Portugal, the wine is always very dry; unfortunately, some producers sweeten theirs a bit when they ship it off to sweet-tooth America. Those wines are much less attractive to me. Also, in Portugal, Vinho Verde always has a lovely sparkle to it; sometimes here it has gone flat. The best way to know if you have a good Vinho Verde on your hands is to taste it.

Recommendations
Some of the producers that most reliably ship authentic Vinho Verde to the US:

Adega Coopertiva de Ponte do Lima
Rei do Minho
Cruzeiro Lima
Mesa do Presidente
Quinta da Avaleda

-David Rosengarten