Vintage Port Notes

Churchill’s was the first new Port shipper to be established in half-a-century when it was founded by Johnny Graham, aged 29, in 1981. He has now been joined in the business by his daughter and son-in-law, Zoe and Ben.

I had the very real pleasure of lining up a series of aged tawnies from Reserve up to Twenty Years Old. The flight included one of the great names of Tawny Port, namely Ramos Pinto, as well as recently launched single quinta wines, one with a hidden pedigree for fine tawny.

It is the time of year when the Port shippers make their pre-Christmas releases. Often these are Single Quinta Vintage Ports, released with the benefit of some bottle age in their cellars. Coming from good years in between so-called ‘classic’ declarations these wines are often great value, particularly when the UK supermarkets are involved.

I had forgotten just how much I enjoy Port until I started tasting the recently released 2018s. With Covid-19, lockdown and the recent warm weather in the UK I have not been opening bottles of vintage Port. My wife is not a fortified fan (despite hailing from Madeira) and I have had no one to share a bottle of Port with. Sad but true.

Don Schliff began collecting Port in 1969, inspired by a restaurant named the Studio Grill in Hollywood where Vintage Port was served by the glass. For many years the restaurant’s owner Ardison Philips organized vertical Port tastings on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year.

Not since 1846 / 1847 have two generally declared Port vintages fallen back-to-back.  As Adrian Bridge, Managing Director of the Fladgate Partnership, pointed out to the assembled wine trade and wine writers at the recent launch of the widely declared 2017 Port vintage in London, seven has a habit of being a lucky number for the Port trade.

It has been a tawny Christmas and New Year for me, with samples lined up from earlier in 2018 for the new edition of my book, Port and the Douro. Tawny port is now gloriously fashionable in its own quiet way, with global sales up by €21.3 billion over the past seven years.

António Agrellos, Technical Director of Quinta do Noval, retired at the end of 2017 after working quietly in the background for 24 years. He is rightly credited with a revival in Noval’s fortunes, the estate having underperformed (sometimes woefully) in the 1970s and 1980s.

Five years have lapsed since the last generally declared Port vintage: the well-received 2011s which were universally declared in the spring of 2013.  The custom of waiting until the second year after the harvest before declaring gives the Port shippers time to be certain about the overall quality of the wines as well as a bit of useful foresigh

 There seems to be a race in the UK this year to get the first vintage Port offers off the ground. This may be due to the weakness of the 2017 Bordeaux campaign but also because of the glorious quality of the now widely declared 2016 Ports. Among the major houses only Niepoort and Ramos Pinto so far decided not to declare the vintage outright.

The annual portfolio tasting held by UK wine importer Fells is one not to be missed. Firstly they represent a broad range of exceptional producers from all over the world, secondly the tasting is beautifully and expertly organized and lastly they always show a good range of fortified wines.

Every year the Manchester Tennis and Racquet Club ask me to host a Port dinner to which members bring their own wines and the club contributes a bottle or two from their own cellar.

This tasting, held in the splendid dining room at Christie’s King Street, St James’s, is the prelude to an extensive sale of old wines from Ramos Pinto’s own cellars to be held in December 2017.

After 23 years (21 in bottle)  the 1994 vintage should be starting to drink well. For the Port trade this was something of a watershed year, following on from the rather patchy 1985s and an interesting split declaration in 1991-92. By 1994 we were all in need of a serious vintage.

This is the fourth in a series of fifty year old Ports from Taylor.  The wine was aged in pipe (cask) until it was bottled in 2016 for release this year. As a result it is an aged tawny in style, bottled as ‘Single Harvest’ and effectively a colheita in Portuguese parlance.

Quinta do Vallado celebrated its tercentenary in 2016. To commemorate this, the family have bottled a wine that has been held in cask since 1888. Three 650 litre pipes, set aside in 1888, have been reduced through years evaporation to just 700 litres.

When policemen start looking younger, it comes as sign that you are getting older. The same feeling comes when you start drinking Vintage Ports that you remember being declared, two decades earlier. So it was just before Christmas (at the end of a long lunch)  when we drank two wines from classic declarations the 1990s.

Due to the re-construction of my new website followed by a major outage of our internet (thank you so much BT) I am rather behind at following up with some of the wines that I have tasted over the summer. In June 2016, over São João in Oporto and the EU Referendum in the UK, I visited Sogrape, Portugal’s largest wine producers.

Graham's 1983 was served at the Saintsbury Club Dinner in the Vintner's Hall on 18th October 2016. This is one of the best wines of the vintage, a year over-shadowed by 1985 until the latter threw up one or two rather nasty surprises.

There is a growing market for anniversary wines and, with their longevity and staying power, fortified wines have a captive market. 1966 was of course a declared Port vintage and anyone born in that year certainly has a wine for life (search for notes on Fonseca 1966 for example on this website).

It was once the custom for a landed family with a large country house to ship and bottle a pipe of vintage Port, often to mark the birth of a child.  A pipe is a serious quantity of wine amounting to approximately 57 dozen so you need a good, spacious cellar to store the wine for the 21 years or so it needs to reach maturity.

After two exceptionally dry years, the winter of 2012-13 was wet with the heaviest rainfall recorded in March, all of which helped to restore ground water levels prior to the growing season.

Cockburn, one of the greatest names in Port, are celebrating their bicentennial this year. The company was founded in 1815 by Scottish brothers; Robert and John Cockburn.

By Sandeman's own admission this is a wine made in the 'modern style', to be drunk now or over the next 15 years. It comes from a ripe year but the heat of the vintage is not evident in this wine which is well-made and, above all, well-balanced. As you will see from the note below I would recommend drinking this in its full bloom of youth.