Winemaker Notes
This is a big, ripe year where the natural acidity of Quinta da Gricha plays an important role in the Vintage blend. With a powerful ox-blood colour, this muscular Port has a fresh vein of tannin that enhances its fruity aroma, bringing vibrancy to its rich, jammy palate and ensuring a balanced and elegant finish. This is a concentrated but fresh Vintage Port with an intrinsic quality to age beautifully in bottle for several decades.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Well-packed, with a dense mix of briar, black currant, menthol, plum reduction and licorice root notes that give this a tumbling feel as it moves along. Shows serious underlying grip and an inner freshness, which bode well for cellaring. Some patience is required. Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barocca, Tinta Francisca and Tinta Cão. Best from 2038 through 2055.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2020 Vintage Port, set to be bottled in a couple of weeks, is the final blend and out of cask. It is a field blend coming in at 103 grams of residual sugar and was aged for 24 months in large oak vats. A bit herbal and also showing some eucalyptus, this is aromatic and well structured. Lean but powerful, this shows finesse and flavor, with a serious backbone. It needs some aging, and it should age well. This has a higher upside than the Gricha, its sibling in this report. That will become clearer as the years go by, I suspect, but they are both among the more interesting 2020s I have seen.
Sample: 93-95 -
James Suckling
A youthful and vibrant character of crushed berries, raisins, dark chocolate and nut shell. Full-bodied with a smooth and velvety texture. It’s plush, dark-fruited, and slightly chewy at the end with a chocolaty finish.
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.