I changed my mind after Matt Kramer, a columnist for Wine Spectator, gushed about some whites he had encountered in Portugal. One, he wrote, he might have mistaken for a Chassagne-Montrachet if he had tasted it blind; an error, he pointed out, that would have been “hardly a slur upon a wine’s character.”

I had heard a few other recent rhapsodies upon the quality of Portuguese whites, and concluded that they were well worth investigating. So the panel gathered to sample 20 from recent vintages, hoping for a few of our own bolts of enlightenment.

For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Pascaline Lepeltier, the wine director at Rouge Tomate and a newly minted master sommelier, who had recently traveled to Portugal, and Todd Wernstrom, a wine distributor whose company, Ice Bucket Selections, does not deal in Portuguese wines.

I can’t say that any of us felt the thrill of a discovery, though I found the wines pleasing and intriguing. As is often the case with Portuguese reds, all the whites were made from indigenous Portuguese grapes, yet none struck us as especially distinctive in the way that carricante seems unique to Mount Etna or furmint to Hungary. Quite a few of the wines were made in the modern fashion, fermented in steel tanks and bottled young to preserve freshness and aromas.

Our No. 1 bottle, the 2012 Luís Pato from the Beira Atlântico region, was in this style. It was made primarily of the Maria Gomes grape, Portugal’s most common white grape, also known as fernão pires. It was tangy and delicious, spicy, herbal and intended for early drinking. At just $13, it was our best value. You could go through a lot of this wine in the summer.

Other wines saw time in barrels and were more capable of aging, like our No. 3 bottle, the 2012 branco from Quinta de Foz de Arouce, which happened to be the wine that caught Mr. Kramer’s imagination, though it was the 2010, with a couple more years of age, that moved him to the Burgundy comparison.

Image No. 2: Quinta do Sagrado Douro 2012 Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The ’12, made entirely from the cerceal grape (not related to sercial, a constituent in Madeira), was lively with complex fruit and herbal flavors and the sort of inviting texture that comes from barrel aging — mostly old barrels, which did not impart flavors. I look forward to drinking this wine in a few years. It was also one of the more expensive in the tasting at $37.