Vintage Port Notes

Though challenging, the 2014 harvest in the north of Portugal was not the damp squib that it proved to be in the south.  After a wet winter, spring was mild and budburst was early. But the weather remained unsettled through the early part of the summer, with some vineyards suffering localized hail damage.

The 2001 vintage of Quinta do Noval Nacional was officially declared in 2003 but the wine was never released.  According to Christian Seely, Managing Director of Noval, the 2001 ‘was very backward and quite closed up, dense and very tannic.

I spent that back end of 2016 tasting tawny Ports both for an article in Decanter, (entitled 'Understanding Tawny Port' ) http://www.decanter.com/wine/wine-regions/port/understanding-tawny-port-... as well as an article for The Field o

The Victorian club dining room at the MTRC is the setting for an annual tasting of vintage Ports with wines from the club stock as well as from member’s own cellars. After some outstanding wines at previous dinners, this year’s selection proved to be rather a mixed bag with two promising wines turning out to be rather a disappointment.

I had lunch in London with David Guimaraens this week. David is the winemaker for the Fladgate Partnership which embraces Taylor, Fonseca, Croft and Krohn. The meal (substantial Spanish tapas) was accompanied by Port, all the way through.

This wine was served at the One Hundred and Sixty Eighth Meeting of the Saintsbury Club at the Vintner's Hall to the general approbation of members and their guests: not the deepest of colours but still showing a youthful pink hue; fresh, fragrant and floral, quintessential mature vintage Port aromas; s

This wine was produced in a hot, drought-afflicted year and is a blend of very low yielding vinha velha (75%) and late ripening Touriga Franca (a vineyard planted just four years earlier in 2001). The old vines produced an average of just 0.87kg per vine, which helps to account for the voluptuous concentration in this wine. It was mostly made in robotic lagares with 35% foot trodden in the time-honoured manner.

Every year I am invited to lead a Port dinner at Manchester’s oldest sporting club. Some of the wines come form club stock and members also generously bring their own bottles to share. My contribution was a bottle of Croft 1963 which looked good on paper but proved to be a letdown in the glass. We tasted, then drank, some outstanding wines.

The Port house Fonseca celebrated its bicentenary with a dinner at The Wallace Collection in London on Portugal Day, 10th June.

I was sent a sample of this rather special wine which I thought I would share with you before Christmas. Sandeman have long produced some excellent aged tawnies, especially at the twenty and thrity year old levels.

I am very grateful to the The Vintage Port Club, Odense for inviting me to this comprehensive tasting of 1994 Vintage Ports and to celebrate their 25th anniversary with them. At the club’s behest the wines were scored out of 100 which may mean that I have slightly under-marked some wines or overmarked others.

Quinta do Noval have recently declared 2012. This was a challenging year and, following on from a universal declaration in 2011, the main shippers have opted for single quinta vintage Ports (SQVPS).   

Very old tawny Ports are currently á moda to use the Portuguese expression. In fact, having long been the preserve of the so called ‘Portuguese shippers’, they have now migrated to the British shippers. In this case the migration is literal.

I am fortunate to have tasted this wine on a number of recent occasions. Until this month it was a 'secret Nacional', bottled but undeclared. The 2004 vintage came hard on the heals of the widely declared 2003 harvest and was treated as a single quinta vintage by most shippers which nonetheless produced some impressive wines.

These wines followed the tutored tasting of classic grape varieties: 

This is a parallel tasting of wines from two very individual Port shippers, both with a strong family input. The wines were presented by João Nicolau de Almeida and Dirk Niepoort respectively. These two producers obviously resepct each other even though they admit to doing things very differently. This is emphatically not a Ramos Pinto v.

The 1994 vintage represents a generational change for Port. It wasn’t so much the people in charge that changed as the wines themselves.  For a number of leading shippers the 1960s represented the end of an era when founding families were replaced by multinational owners.

With the 2011 Vintage Port tasting season coming to an end, I have received four bottled wines (as opposed to cask samples) from Sogevinus, the Spanish group that own Barros, Calem, Kopke and Burmester.

Quinta do Noval is celebrating a significant anniversary in 2013. Twenty years ago, in the wake of the truly dreadful 1993 harvest, Christian Seely was appointed to manage the Portuguese estate following its high profile acquisition by AXA Millésimes earlier that year.

It is not very often that any of us get to taste, let alone drink, Quinta do Noval Nacional Vintage Port. The wine comes from 2ha of ungrafted vines at the heart of the quinta and is so named because the vines are Portuguese, without foreign rootstock, growing in Portuguese soil and therefore ‘attached to the soil of the nation’.  

There has been a rush to evaluate the recently declared 2011 Ports, caused partly by the excitement of a new and undoubtedly fine vintage but also by the use of the internet both for selling and evaluating the wines. Most UK merchants have already sold their allocations although a few are holding back their offers until later in the year. 

I tasted this pair of old colheitas at the end of last year for the launch of the House of Tantalus Port Library. Since then the producer, Wise & Krohn, has been sold to the Fladgate Partnership who own Taylor, Fonseca and Croft, so it is likely that we will be seeing more of these beautifully kept old wines in future.

There is a saying in the Port trade that whereas ‘vintage Port is made in the vineyard, tawny is made in the tasting room’. This tasting led by Paul and Johnny Symington marks a subtle change in direction for Graham’s as a producer of tawny Port. The change is in the tasting room where Charles Symington is now in charge.

In the course of updating my book, Port and the Douro, I asked a number of leading shippers to submit single quinta vintage Ports from the decade 2000 – 2010 for tasting.  The first part of the tasting includes a very impressive set of Ports from the 2004 vintage.