This selection of wines from the Fladgate Partnership was presented by David Guimaraens and Natasha Bridge in the tasting room at the Fonseca lodge during a recent visit to Porto.
It includes a re-taste of the recently declared 2009 vintage as well as a number of single estate wines from the three houses that make up the Fladgate Partnership.
The wines are presented in the order they were tasted.
As soon as I stepped from Piccadilly into the lobby of the RAF Club I smelt the quality of the Port. This tasting of 26 wines spanning over a century was put together by members of the Port Forum who had been decanting the wines all afternoon. The most striking aspect of the tasting is the strong family resemblance of the wines through most of the twentieth century, at least up to 1970.
It came as quite a surprise to hear that the Fladgate Partnership had declared 2009 across the board. Although 2009 was a very good year in the vineyard, it comes very soon after 2007 and it is the fourth fully declared vintage for Taylor, Fonseca and Croft this decade. The Symington family have decided not to declare 2009 (apart from a very small quantity of Warre) and the only other declaree that I am aware of so far is Niepoort. Not for the first time, Dirk Niepoort has stated that his 2009 ‘is the best vintage I have ever made’.