Winemaker Notes
Bright cherry, toffee color, with a bouqeut of lavenday and honety. On the palate, notes of marzipan with excellent balance of fruit and natural acidity. Best served chilled and within two years of bottling.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Wonderful interplay between fruit richness, savoury depth and zesty lift. Honey-glazed almonds, preserved cherries and poached plums mingle with rose water and candied blood orange. Top notes of camphor and dry sage add elegance and intrigue. Intensely focused with an assertive acid line and subtle, fine tannins.
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James Suckling
Attractive aromas of toffee, caramel, milk chocolate and nut shell with dried apricots and orange jam, following through to a full, medium-sweet palate with mellow, creamy texture and spicy notes at the end. Drink or hold.
Port is a sweet, fortified wine with numerous styles: Ruby, Tawny, Vintage, Late Bottled Vintage (LBV), White, Colheita, and a few unusual others. It is blended from from the most important red grapes of the Douro Valley, based primarily on Touriga Nacional with over 80 other varieties approved for use. Most Ports are best served slightly chilled at around 55-65°F. To learn more, see our full Port Wine Guide
The home of Port—perhaps the most internationally acclaimed beverage—the Douro region of Portugal is one of the world’s oldest delimited wine regions, established in 1756. The vineyards of the Douro, set on the slopes surrounding the Douro River (known as the Duero in Spain), are incredibly steep, necessitating the use of terracing and thus, manual vineyard management as well as harvesting. The Douro's best sites, rare outcroppings of Cambrian schist, are reserved for vineyards that yield high quality Port.
While more than 100 indigenous varieties are approved for wine production in the Douro, there are five primary grapes that make up most Port and the region's excellent, though less known, red table wines. Touriga Nacional is the finest of these, prized for its deep color, tannins and floral aromatics. Tinta Roriz (Spain's Tempranillo) adds bright acidity and red fruit flavors. Touriga Franca shows great persistence of fruit and Tinta Barroca helps round out the blend with its supple texture. Tinta Cão, a fine but low-yielding variety, is now rarely planted but still highly valued for its ability to produce excellent, complex wines.
White wines, generally crisp, mineral-driven blends of Arinto, Viosinho, Gouveio, Malvasia Fina and an assortment of other rare but local varieties, are produced in small quantities but worth noting.
With hot summers and cool, wet winters, the Duoro has a maritime climate.