If you’re ashamed of yourself for buying wines based on the label, I’m even worse: I buy according to the shape of the bottle. Nothing pulls me toward a wine faster than the tall, willowy posture of a classically packaged wine from Germany, Alsace, Austria or Muscadet.

Something about the very silhouette implies – and crazily enough, usually delivers – the taste arc from the bottom up: a full belly of fruit, precisely cut by mineral tension through the upper body, lashed with tense acidity as it ascends the neck to tickle one’s imagination and invite another sip.

But the tallest bottles I’ve found belong to a region not ordinarily given the respect and hipness quotient that wine enthusiasts are so quick to shower upon German, Austrian, Alsatian and western-Loire wines: Portugal, home to Vinho Verde. There, the spiritual bond shared by other long-necked-bottle regions is upheld, and mightily.

Many of these wines are packed tight with rip-snorting mineral power and laced with bewildering, long-lived blasts of citrus. Excellent Vinho Verde whites are clean and stripped bare, renounce any adornment, swear death to oak, suffer from no distraction. They punch straight.

These are the traits of serious wine, but Vinho Verde whites also possess more frivolous characteristics: lightness of body, slight effervescence and radically low alcohol (the only other wines that come close to their 10 to 11 percent levels usually contain significant residual sugar, while Vinho Verde wines never do).

It’s a strange combination – light body and low alcohol, combined with fierceness of flavor and black-hole-level mineral density. And so most people dismiss, or at best tolerate, these wines as mere “summer sippers.” Even when respected wine critics mention Vinho Verde, it seems like they’re just trying to show how unpretentious they are: “Look at me not being a wine snob! I’m on the beach, and I love these cheap, meaningless wines!”

I don’t love cheap, meaningless wines. You can get in and out of the drive-through with a bottle of non-vintage, mass-produced Vinho Verde for seven bucks. It’ll taste like barely alcoholic lime seltzer, and it’s true that there are some days on the beach or back porch when that’s just what’s called for.

But the true bargains in Vinho Verde come when you delve into the good ones, at $10 to $15. Then, a category that seemed entirely featherbrained lands a bomb before your eyes. Or more accurately, given the sensation I get when drinking one, it dunks your whole head in a bucket of ice water. Wake! Up!

The tradition in Vinho Verde is to grow high-yielding grape vines everywhere – they climb stone walls and telephone poles, they creep over the roads – and eke out a whole lotta characterless liquid.

But an increasing number of producers are training their vines on trellises and pruning assiduously, farming with more focus and guiding their grapes to fuller ripeness than in the past. These indigenous varietals – loureiro, alvarinho, azal, trajadura, arinto – have distinctive characters and tremendous potential. As fuller ripeness becomes the norm, alcohol levels are rising. But they’re still relatively low, and the wines remain eminently refreshing. I’ll take a slightly higher-alcohol wine (around 11 percent) that didn’t have its under-ripeness masked by added sugar and carbon dioxide, over a 9-percent-alc cocktail of watery juice and additives any day.

Vinho Verde is in Portugal’s northwest, capped by the east-west-running Minho river that separates the country from Spanish Galicia. This area straddling both nations is known for exquisite fish, both endo- and exoskeletal, and the briny, bracing whites from albariño and godello grapes in Spain that accompany it so well.

Think of Vinho Verde similarly. If you live in Maine and consume the foods we’re famous for, you’d be crazy not to drink these wines.

Though the DOC ends at the Atlantic Ocean, most of the good vineyards are somewhat inland. They see a lot of rain so are profusely verdant, hence the name. (Yes, the wines often have a green hue, but Vinho Verde refers primarily to the wine-growing region, not the wine itself. The DOC’s rising excellence includes red wines.)

Verdant sounds good but for vineyards is not ideal, since too much vigor produces more fruit than the soils can provide with the compounds that give interesting flavor. This is why haphazardly farmed vineyards in Vinho Verde have historically given us such vapid wines, and why reducing yields has been so instrumental in improving quality.

The subsoils are mostly granite, a fact that is abundantly clear upon first taste of the wines. Most wine lovers prize a sense of “minerality,” but I can’t think of a wine category that more clearly delivers the delineated feel and flavor of granitic minerals than Vinho Verde. There are legions of young-n-withit restaurant wine directors whose promotions tease out the subtlest expressions of salt, flint and smoke in Muscadet, riesling, grüner veltliner, Chablis and falanghina, while untouched Vinho Verde laughs from on high.

Here, then, an attempt at redirection. The wines manage to be both exciting and approachable, and delicious for all but the most die-hard oak lovers. They’re not challenging to “get,” but they offer much beyond their first impressions. They taste with thrilling immediacy like they could not be from anywhere else. And given their history in the marketplace and their homeland’s financial troubles, they offer tremendous quality for the price.

Some of these have retained the classic super-tall bottle shape I’m such a shallow sucker for. Some of them have found their way into less distinctive Bordeaux shapes. That too is a sign of Vinho Verde whites’ expanded flavor palate, raised ambitions and broadened appeal. They no longer need to stand out on a shelf in order to stand out in your life.

1. João Silva e Sousa and Francisco Baptista are the diligent winemakers at Lua Cheia em Vinhas Velhas, and two of their wines are now available here. The Toucas 2014 ($11), made with trajadura, loureiro and arinto grapes, is a perfect introduction to serious-but-not-too-serious Vinho Verde. I love how the fruit so fully breaks out of the citrus box: it’s loaded with white peach and nectarine flavor, but backed up by plenty of wet-stone cut. You can quickly empty a bottle – at 9.5 percent alcohol – and be barely buzzed, then reach for another.

2. Lua Cheia’s next level is the Maria Papoila 2014 ($15). The loureiro and alvarinho grapes were clearly picked later to attain fuller ripeness, resulting in an 11.5-percent alcohol wine that drinks like a bottle of Toucas inflated to full size. There’s more of everything here: more granitic grip, much more lime and tangerine character, more salty spray, more structure. The wine’s name is a reference to a 1937 propaganda film about a country girl who comes to the big city and shows the sophisticated urbanites what’s important in life. Get the metaphor?

3. The Mica 2013 ($15), from arinto, azal and loureiro, has a cross-section of its namesake on the label, in case you needed reminding of the wine’s provenance and nature. This is a steely, light-reflecting wine, garlic-tinged and almost crunchy with geology. Alcohol is 10 percent, all fat stripped from the bones. A platter of oysters with mignonette, or fried baitfish with a small tub of lemony aïoli besides, are the natural accompaniments.

4. João Portugal Ramos is widely credited with having been a prime force in the modernization of Portuguese winemaking. His Lima 2013 ($9) is exclusively from loureiro grapes. It’s a deceptively rich and spicy wine, with 11.5 alcohol, and adds a delicately earthy element to the tangerine and lime character. Vinho Verdes as a rule play in high keys, but the Lima brings a bit more bass to the music.

Joe Appel works at Rosemont Market. He can be reached at:

soulofwine.appel@gmail.com