Winemaker Notes
Fonseca Twenty Year Old Tawny Porto is deep amber in color with russet highlights. Its superb bouquet is a complex marriage of ripe, plummy, mature fruit, warm spicy overtones of cinnamon and butterscotch and subtle oak nuances. Full-bodied and voluminous on the palate, its smooth, velvety texture is carried into a long clean, elegant finish. Tawny Ports of age will not improve once bottled; they should be served at room temperature or barely cool at the end of a meal with nuts or not overly-sweet desserts.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
A candied style showing mounting richness behind scents of dried fig, caramel, toffee and cream. Multi-layered on the palate, with mouth-filling grapiness and balancing citrus.
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Wine Enthusiast
This gorgeous Port is at the perfect stage where there are still freshness and hints of orange and dried fruit, while the wood aging is concentrating the wine into its essence.
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Wine Spectator
Bright and fresh in feel, with dried white peach, jasmine and praline notes streaming through, backed by light hazelnut and pecan accents on the racy finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The NV 20 Year Old Tawny was bottled with a bar top cork in 2013. It comes in at 111.6 grams per liter of residual sugar. A big mouthful, this is a 20 that first coats the palate and then ends with silky texture and concentrated flavor. Very graceful, it is not as impressive in terms of mid-palate density, but it is more than respectable. It shows fine complexity, appropriate to its age category. The finish seals the deal, more lingering and gripping than I expected from the first taste. It is another delicious Tawny from the Taylor Fladgate group this issue, so dig in.
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Wine & Spirits
A classical balance of the fresh and the mature, this 20-Year-Old offers warm honey, apple and almond notes on a supple texture with just a touch of grip. The flavors are rich while the structure holds them tight.
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.