Port is best experienced with a little age. Ageing in cask or bottle? This turns out to be the biggest question. Both examples of Portugal's fine wine are worth the time.
To really experience the magic of Port, you need to move up to fine Ports. With this basic outline of styles, you’ll be able to experiment confidently with Port – whether at your local bottle shop or at the end of a restaurant meal.
Cask-aged Port
Cask-aged Ports, commonly known as tawnies, spend their time maturing in wooden casks. Over time, the wine and the wood exchange characteristics. The wood takes the wine’s redness while the wine dons the cask’s amber hue. Also exchanged are flavors—the tawny gives away much of the red fruit of its youth and exchanges it for hallmark caramel, honey and nutty notes. Other than a shared name, these wines have very little in common with the tawnies discussed previously.
Tawnies are usually blended into house styles. Fine tawnies are blended to average ages—10, 20, 30, 40 or 40+ years—which are shown on the bottle. In rare instances, a tawny of a particular year will excel in the barrel and be bottled separately as a Colheita (col-YEH-tah) or single-vintage tawny. Colheitas are aged in barrel for a minimum of seven years, and sometimes considerably longer. Bottling date – noted on the label – is critical, as these wines will not gain complexity after bottling. Chill the younger tawnies as an aperitif, and drink the older after a meal with a cheese course or crème brulée.
Bottle-aged Port
Bottle-aged Ports, sometimes characterized as ruby, only spend about three to five years in a wooden cask before they are blended and bottled. Vintage Character, or Reserve-level Port, is where you should start drinking for affordable quality rubies. They are fairly common in wine shops and restaurants, with proprietary names like Warre’s Warrior and Smith-Woodhouse Lodge Reserve.
The next step up in bottle-aged Port is Late Bottled Vintage, or LBV. Unlike the Reserve offerings, which are blended for consistency, LBVs are from a single vintage and made in better years—but don’t confuse them with vintage Port! Most modern-style LBVs are bottled filtered and will not improve in the bottle. However, some traditional holdouts are bottled unfiltered and laid down for a few more years before market release. LBVs are generally ready to drink upon release and show more complexity and length than Reserve bottlings, but less so than true vintage Ports.
In years not considered worthy of formal vintage declaration – itself a topic for another time – many shippers make single quinta (estate) vintage bottlings. These can often be phenomenal values, especially in years directly following declared vintages, since shippers are loath to declare vintages back to back. A following has developed for youthful consumption of these wines, especially by those drinking young, tannic Napa Cabernets, and for much the same reason. In their youth, the wines pack a wallop of fruit and mouth-drying tannin. These Ports will nonetheless age gracefully like their pricier siblings, if not always as long.
Which brings us to the pride of the shipper, the vintage Port. These wines are uncommonly structured and rich. While some might enjoy them upon release, they are meant to age—and age they will, the best vintages lasting many decades. As these rare and expensive wines age, their tannins smooth out, color fades, and the finish lengthens. Like other great European reds, aged vintage Ports reward patience with suppleness and complexity.
Bottle-aged Ports are warming drinks best enjoyed after a meal, sipped alone, with chocolate desserts, or blue cheeses.
Now, go! Order Port after (or before) your next meal. As with other wines, there is much more research you can do, but the best research is found at the bottom of a good glass. Cheers!
Resources
Port and the Duoro, Richard Mayson (Mitchell Beazley, latest ed. November 2004)
