All you ever wanted to know about port but were too busy to ask…
(Photo taken from a Land Rover, not driven by me)
Port never suffered quite as badly from fashions as sherry did. Sherry’s renaissance has been largely due to its discovery by sommeliers, mainly of the dry kind, and their hand-selling of it as an aperitif in the cooler kind of restaurant. The sort of sherry that Barbara Pym’s spinster heroines served in refined little glasses to young curates was invariably sweet, or at least medium (usually an amontillado). And the sweet sherries of the 1950s and 1960s were far superior to the Croft Original and Harvey’s Bristol Cream of today.
Indeed, the late Frank Searson, one of the great Dublin wine merchants and a dear friend, gave me a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream which he had had bottled in 1962 with extra long corks for extended ageing. I opened it for - I think John Wilson of The Irish Times and his wife Christine - a couple of years ago and it was sensational: dark, deep, breathtakingly complex. We drank it with Walnuts and mature Crozier Blue from Tipperary.
But I digress, as usual.
Port, like sherry (and madeira and marsala) is a fortified wine.The reason for this strange name? All of them have their fermentation arrested by the addition of spirit alcohol. Yeast will give up the ghost around 15% abv. Simple. The reason for doing so, incidentally, lies in the distant past when English merchants wanted to get the robust red wines of the Douro back home for the domestic market. Adding brandy helped to keep the wine fresh on the voyage; the sweetness, if you like, was a bonus.
Port is that strong, sweet, robust and potentially fabulously complex wine from Portugal’s baking hot Douro Valley. The sides of the valley, indeed, are so steep that they have to be terraced so that vines can be grown there.
And what kind of grapes are we talking about? Not very familiar ones, to be honest. There’s Touriga Nacional which you might occasionally see as a dry varietal table wine (the South Africans grow some for this very purpose); and there’s Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz (better known by its Spanish name of Tempranillo), Tinta Barocca, Tinta Cao and Tinta Amarela.
Port is a hot climate wine and the grapes are picked when exceptionally ripe and sweet. Traditionally, they were tipped into stone lagars (shallow stone troughs) and trodden by naked feet (dancing feet, as music used to be provided). These days they get the juice out in more prosaic and mechanical ways but the odd lagar is still trodden for the benefit of tourists. Many port producers use an adapted form of fermentation vessel fitted with stainless steel “feet” that agitate the grapes; warm water is passed through these so as to imitate the warmth of a human limb.
Fermentation starts and the grape juice bubbles away as the yeast converts the fructose into alcohol and the sweetness, of course, starts to decline. The canny port producers put a halt to this process while, at the same time, boosting the alcohol level by simply adding grape spirit (essentially unaged brandy) to the fermenting juice. It means that they end up with a wine that weighs in at around 22% abv with lots of sweetness in the form of residual sugar. Now, I should add that a lot of the cheaper, more commercial ports end up with a lower proportion of alcohol – generally around 18% abv – but the same principle applies.
The new sweet wine at this stage is very cloudy and needs time for the particles of vegetable matter to precipitate. Traditionally, this is achieved by putting the new wine into large wooden vessels and letting gravity and time take care of the rest.
After a couple of years, the wine is clear and ready for bottling, either blended together as a ruby port or as the wine of one year and ready to drink, having been filtered and stabilised, as a late bottled vintage or LBV. Or, of course, the wine might be destined for long ageing in bottle as vintage port. Unlike the other two, vintage port will not be filtered or stabilised before going into the bottle. This is why vintage port “throws a crust”, i.e. produces a lot of sediment, and needs to be decanted carefully.
Each port producer decides individually if the wine of a given year is good enough to be “declared” as vintage port. As a result, there are some strange anomalies. For example, Cockburn’s didn’t “declare” their 1977, and there has been no doubt, for many years, that this is one of the greatest vintages of the last century. It was also the year of my Leaving Certificate and definitely not one of my greatest academic years. When I drink some of my modest stash of Dow’s 1977, I reflect on how I was poring over Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta as the grapes were ripening.
Mature vintage port takes some finding and it does not come cheap. A port house that remains somewhat under the radar while, in my view, making excellent wines, is Smith Woodhouse (part of the Symington Group that also includes Dow’s, Warre’s, Graham’s, Cockburn’s, Gould Campbell, Quarles Harris and Martinez). Smith Woodhouse Vintage 2000, from a great vintage, is just about ready to drink but will kick on for decades. A wine for your grandchildren perhaps? From O’Brien’s for €99. If you want to take a longer view, consider the Quinta do Noval Vintage 2020 for €90 from Celtic Whiskey Shop. The most exclusive vintage port, by a country mile, is the single vineyard Quinta do Noval Nacional which, alas, has never moistened my lips. It’s very hard to find but the Celtic Whiskey Shop has it in the 2023 vintage for €895. A bottle! It needs half a century at least.
When a port producer decides that the top wine of a particular year is not quite worthy of declaration as a vintage port, but is still pretty decent, they may bottle it as a single quinta port, essentially the same thing as a vintage port but generally a bit lighter although needing age and decanting. Taylor’s Vargellas is a fine example of such ports. Vargellas is the quinta or estate.
If you want to try a fairly mature single quinta port may I heartily recommend the bargain Warre’s