In a year which has seen VILA VITA Parc’s fine dining offering, Ocean restaurant, dramatically transformed to great acclaim, the talent of Chef Hans Neuner and his team has been afforded another gastronomic accolade, ranking at 102nd position in La Liste’s 1000 Best Restaurants in the World.
La Liste’s technology aggregates the world’s most trusted food guides and hundreds of thousands of restaurant reviews globally, to craft the perfect ranking of the world’s best restaurants. At 102nd position, Ocean is proud to be the highest ranked of just six Portuguese restaurants included in the list, announced this December in Paris.

From the tropical terrains of the Indian subcontinent comes the next big thing for the meat substitute market. It sounds sensible for a country that is obsessed with choosing between the right and the righteous. The western kitchen is obliged by the wondrous orb that is called jackfruit.

An Indian staple, this fruit is eaten in general at its ripe stage around the world. However, in few parts of Asia the raw form is cooked with intense tropical spices. The resulting dish resembles pulled pork preparations and the taste is strikingly similar too.

Traditional Algarvian recipes for all your favourites - Soups, fish dishes, meat dishes and desserts.

Click here to VIEW.

I wonder what percentage of wine lovers who live here in the Algarve drink locally-produced Algarve wine on a regular basis? I’m not just talking about us foreigners, but local algarvios too.

The vast majority of Algarve wine is, of course, consumed by tourists, visitors who rightly choose to try a glass of the local vinho and are very pleasantly surprised. Many thousands of them are so impressed that they pay a visit to one or more of the local wineries. 

Spread the Wine embraces artisan wine producers from across Portugal, and carefully selects a small portfolio of premium wines from the Douro, Dão, Alentejo and Vinho Verde regions.

Our quest for wine and food takes us, sometimes, on rough tracks and to remote hamlets, but we bring back gorgeous products and inspiring stories of family owned businesses and socially committed projects.

Quinta dos Vales' Marquês dos Vales DUO 2012 red, its most recent cuvée, was distinguished with another gold medal, this time in a nationwide competition.
The combination of Touriga Nacional and Petit Verdot grape varieties, which had already dazzled the jury of the “IX Concurso de Vinhos do Algarve” last month, saw its great potential highlighted once more by winning its second gold medal of the season in the 2016 edition of the competition “Vinhos de Portugal” organized by ViniPortugal in cooperation with Revista de Vinhos.

This year's winners were tasted at the Open Door 2016.

While the results of this year’s competition of “The Best Wine of the Algarve” were not yet known, “Open Door” visitors could already enjoy the awarded wines last Sunday, 10th April, including the Gold Medal winner Marquês dos Vales Duo Red 2012. Despite predictions of heavy rain, sunshine graced Quinta dos Vales' 14th edition of the event which, once again, had a high number of visitors.

With the new tourist season ahead, it might be interesting to find out  if the Portuguese wine industry finally has made some progress in the extremely bad marketing approach it has been using so far.

Every year in all of the supermarkets thousands of tourists struggle with the same dilemmas: what is a good wine, what is probably not such a good wine and what wine should I buy?