Hop On Hop Off bus will take you to taste wines in the Algarve 

The first Hop On Hop Off wine bus arrived in the Algarve and, on the 6th and 7th of May, will take participants to visit five wineries in the region and taste their wines.

The starting point of Roads to Wine is in the Portimão riverside area, where there will be two buses with fixed routes and schedules, every 15 minutes, which people can get on whenever they want. 

Maria Loureiro de Lemos, responsible for the organization, explains that the idea for the event had already emerged in 2019, but with the pandemic it was only now possible to move forward.

«There is an event in Switzerland that is relatively similar. At the time, I thought the idea was really cool and wanted to replicate it here in the Algarve. Algarve wines are beginning to gain some notoriety, but there is a big problem which is the fact that the wineries are very dispersed and people cannot drive around to drink. At the time, I spoke with Ricardo Afonso, from the Barraqueiro Group, and asked if they were willing to lend us two buses so that we could have a fixed route here and he immediately agreed and the idea was made», he tells our newspaper.

Tickets for the event cost 20 euros and entitle free entry and exit on the bus for the chosen day, a glass of wine from the event and 10 wine tastings (two in each cellar).

From then on, everything is designed to be flexible and any participant can get on and off the bus at any stop, choose which vineyards to visit, in the order they prefer, and which wines to taste. 

«The idea is to be able to visit the wine cellars and wines of the Algarve, to make people have a relaxed weekend and be able to drink freely, without having to drive», says Maria Loureiro de Lemos.

Tickets are now available and can be purchased online, here, but, in this first edition, they will be limited to 150.

«This year the event is a kind of Test Drive, smaller, and with only 5 cellars. We had 20 who wanted to participate, but we had to reduce», explains the person in charge.

However, Maria Loureiro de Lemos stresses that «next year, if all goes well, the objective is to hold an event with all the wineries, with more routes, and lasting a week».

Participating wineries are Quinta da Penina, Quinta dos Santos, Quinta dos Vales, Arvad Wines and Morgado do Quintão.