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Not Just Any Port in a Storm
By David Rosengarten
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There are many styles of Port, the rich, sweet wine made from grapes grown in Portugal's wild Douro Valley. American Port-lovers have voted with their pocketbooks for the style they prefer: Vintage Port, the biggest, brawniest, reddest, most long-aging, most expensive Port there is. It sounds a lot like the American general preference for Cabernet or Pinot Noir styles: the bigger the better, and don't spare the expense.
For this American, however--influenced only in part by the fact that I must spare the expense, perennially--Vintage Port has never been my cup of tea.
Before I explain why, let me explain what Vintage Port is...and how it fits into the larger picture of Port in general.
In the making of all Ports, after the red Douro Valley grapes are
crushed and fermentation has begun, a wallop of alcohol--in the form of brandy--is added to the fermenting vat. This has two effects: 1) it stops the fermentation process, meaning that some natural sweetness remains in the wine; and 2) it boosts the level of alcohol in the wine (this is why Port is classified as a "fortified" wine, with about 20% alcohol.) The young Ports--deeply purple, very sweet, high in alcohol--are then shipped down the Douro River to the city of Oporto, where they soften and get ready for a thirsty world.
It is here that the basic dichotomy in the world of Port begins to
Emerge. Do you age those young Ports in barrels or in bottles? If you choose the former route--as producers do for most Ports--you have what is called "wood Port." If you choose the latter route, you have what is called "glass port."
What's the difference between the two? To understand that, it is useful to look at the extreme examples of each (there are many styles of Port that fall somewhere in between). A wood Port that has aged for many, many years in barrels--say twenty years or more--loses its purple color entirely and turns brownish or "tawny." It smells, and tastes, of toffee, butterscotch, vanilla, caramel--a miraculous transformation. It is round and smooth. I never make any secret of my preference: it is this type of Port that I find the most alluring, most enchanting, despite the fact that "Tawny Port" gets almost no respect from American wine geeks.
What they prefer, of course, is the ultimate example of "glass Port": Vintage Port. To make a Vintage Port, the producer uses wine from one year only (most Ports are blends of years). He takes that young vintage wine, holds it for two years in barrels (a very short time in Port-world chronology), and then bottles it young--while it is still wildly, vividly purple, while it is still chock-a-block with tannin, while the added alcohol has not yet married seamlessly with the red wine it's invading. So while the "wood Port" is just beginning its decades-long sojourn in wood, the "glass Port" is already out of the barrel and into a bottle. There, it ages much more slowly than it would in wood. Thirty or forty years later, it will still be red, not tawny, will still be tannic, and will still carry the types of aromas and flavors it had in youth: ripe red fruit, berries, sometimes a touch of prunes and raisins. Will it have evolved into something magnificent?
The theory says yes. The textbooks say yes. The American consumers seem to say yes. But I say I've never really seen it happen.
My problem is this: I can't find a Vintage Port that makes me say "Aha! This Vintage Port is at its perfect stage of readiness!" When I drink a young one, I'm overwhelmed by the power, and I listen respectfully as Port hounds mumble "Yes...yes...thirty years will be perfect." When I taste an older Vintage Port--1963 is the vintage that gets the most respect these days--I either say "Well, maybe it needs another thirty years," or "darn, I missed it at its best stage, because the complexity seems to have gone away." And there's always tannin and alcohol to contend with.
Old Tawny Port, however, is another case entirely. If you want to see what I'm talking about, purchase a Tawny Port at your local shop. The good ones are usually available as ten-, twenty-, thirty-, or forty-year-old, with the price rising steadily as the wine gets older. Skip the ten-year-old, because it's still in an in-between stage. But whether the wine is twenty, thirty or forty, I always feel lucky to be sampling it right now. It seems complete, complex, a full realization of potential--with no pain accompanying the flavor. If you really want to taste something tawny that's extraordinary, look for those Tawnies that were made in a single vintage. They're not cheap--usually over $100 a bottle--but they are among the greatest sweet-wine tastes I've ever had. The label will say "Colheita" and a date, such as "Colheita 1934."
So please, by all means, keep buying Vintage Port and keep dreaming about the future of your Vintage Ports, if you wish. But I can only tell you that on my visit to the Douro, about ten years ago, I was having lunch with a group of American wine writers at one of the region's best wineries, Ramos-Pinto. They treated us extremely well at dessert time, opening a bottle of Vintage Port from the 1920s, and a bottle of Colheita Tawny from the 1920s. The writers, true to form, were oohing and aahing about the Vintage Port. They all but ignored the Tawny sitting on the table. ("Oh, that's just Tawny," they were thinking.) The winery people were doing exactly the opposite. I was struck by the different patterns. So I quietly asked the Portuguese gentleman sitting next to me why he and his colleagues were focusing on the Tawny. He smiled and said, "Well, for us, Vintage Port is
wine. But Tawny Port is...Port."
The Real-World Wine Guide Table of Contents
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