The Art of Not Knowing

On the Douro Valley grape harvest, a Portuguese word for improvising, and the quiet freedom of learning something in a place that belongs to someone else.

By Cynthia Baxter, Founder ANLY Travel Experience Studio· Virtuoso Certified Travel Advisor

There is a particular kind of tiredness that rest does not always reach. You can sleep longer, clear the weekend, or go somewhere quiet, and still come home feeling that some part of you was never touched. What that part needed was not less. It needed something that would ask it to pay attention again. In northern Portugal, in the terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley, the grape harvest has a way of asking exactly that.

Desenrascanço: The Portuguese Art of Improvising

The Portuguese have a word that sits close to this. Desenrascanço is the knack of getting yourself out of a tangle with whatever happens to be at hand: the improvised fix, the solution nobody planned, the dinner made from what was left in the cupboard. It is a modest, practical word, and travel understands it better than most of us do at home.

At home we spend a great deal of our lives removing uncertainty. We learn the route before we leave, read the menu before we arrive, check the reviews, make the reservation, and fill each small empty space where something unexpected might once have happened. There is real comfort in that. But there is something to be said, now and then, for not knowing.

This is not because confusion is more meaningful than certainty, or because being lost is better than knowing the way. It is because unfamiliarity asks something different of us. We listen more carefully and watch how other people do things. We attempt the word we are not sure how to pronounce, taste something before we know what it is, and follow someone else's rhythm for a while instead of asking the place to keep to ours. Quietly, almost without noticing, we remember that we are capable of stepping into a world we do not entirely understand.

✦ Inside the Rows: The Douro Valley Grape Harvest

The Art of Not Knowing

Each September, the vindima, the grape harvest, begins in the Douro Valley. The terraces that step down to the river toward towns like Pinhão and Peso da Régua stop being scenery and become what they have always been underneath: working ground. Grapes are cut and gathered and baskets are carried along the rows. Every decision follows the weather, the ripeness of the fruit, and the particular temperament of each vineyard. In the evenings, at some estates, the grapes for port are still trodden by foot in wide stone lagares, arm in arm, to music.

At some quintas, as the wine estates here are called, guests are invited to join the harvest, and suddenly you are no longer looking at the Douro but standing inside it. Someone shows you where to cut. You watch their hands, and you try. Perhaps you understand the instruction, or perhaps you understand mostly through gesture, the way you understood things as a child. You look along the row and slowly begin to see what everyone else can see. You may do it wrong. Someone shows you again, without fuss, and you carry on.

Nothing dramatic has happened. That may be exactly why it stays.

For a little while, the competence you carry through the rest of your life has nowhere to go. You do not have to be the one who knows the schedule, holds the answer, or understands how everything works. You are a guest, learning how something is done in a place that belongs to someone else. There is a humility in that which, if you let it, feels a great deal like freedom.

✦ What Stays

Travel does not need to transform us at every turn. That is too much to ask of a place, and perhaps too much to ask of ourselves. But it can interrupt our certainty. It can bring us close enough to another way of living that we stop watching from the edges and begin, however briefly, to take part. We listen, we try, we get it wrong, and we understand a little more. Somewhere in that exchange, the world becomes less distant than it was.

Perhaps that is what stays: not that we mastered the unfamiliar, but that, for a little while, we were willing to meet it.

ANLY- The Art of What Stays

The Douro Valley harvest usually runs from mid-September into early October, depending on the year's weather. The Alto Douro Wine Region is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Some quintas welcome guests into the rows for a morning of picking, and a few still tread grapes by foot. If you'd like to be there when the baskets come in, we'd be glad tooffer more information.