Winemaker Notes
Deep purple in color, almost opaque. Impressive for its extraordinary intensity, the nose shows wild blackberry fruit aromas wrapped in light cocoa notes. The palate starts in an engaging way and leads to a serious wine, with excellent concentration and volume, and a structure made of compact-textured tannins very well integrated with fresh wild berry fruit hints. A lovely wine that finishes with perfect balance and great persistence. Bottled without filtration, it meets all the conditions for evolving positively in the bottle.
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
This has a pretty nose of smoke, walnuts, brambleberries and chocolate. Some cedar and espresso. It’s full-bodied with intense dried-fruit and nut layers, framed by fine-grained tannins. Medium-sweet with fresh acidity. Long. Unfiltered and aged four years in barrel before bottling. Drink or hold.
-
Wine Spectator
This is opening up already, with a hint of dark earth infusing the core of plum cake and blackberry preserve flavors. A tarry echo emerges on the finish, which shows enough underlying cut for balance. Best from 2021 through 2024. 700 cases imported.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Late Bottled Vintage Port is a field blend with 95 grams of residual sugar. It is a traditional, unfiltered LBV bottled in February 2019 with a long cork. The mid-palate here is average, but the structure is a bit more notable. The fruit is very tasty, in a dry and controlled fashion, but this young LBV shows no hint of complexity or gravitas just yet. It needs a little more time to develop, obviously. It should hold well—there is no rush. Even if you think it is approachable now—moderate power does come out with aeration—it will benefit from a couple of years in the bottle. I'm not surprised this is showing well—in 2015, Crasto made one of its best ever Vintage Ports—but it is a bit understated, relatively speaking, especially on opening. If it is not quite as impressive in its category as the 2015 Vintage Port was, it still managed to improve dramatically when retasted the next day. At that point, there were some nuances of eucalyptus on the nose as well. There were 47,300 bottles produced (a dramatic uptick over the difficult 2014 vintage), plus 12,000 half bottles, from vines with an average age over 60 years old.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Aged in wood for years before bottling, this fine, mature wine boasts rich tannins that have opened into the ripe prune and date flavors. The wine has a sweet profile and is generous and softly textured at the end. Drink now.
-
Wine & Spirits
Warm scents of apricot fruit leather meet tannins that last on dark chocolate tones and spice. This is lean and heady, developing complexity across a long finish
Nestled on a privileged location in the Douro, Quinta do Crasto is one of the oldest winemaking estates in the region – the name ‘Crasto’ is derived from the Latin word ‘castrum’, which means ‘Roman fort’. The first known references to Quinta do Crasto can be traced back to 1615, long before the Douro became the world’s first Demarcated Wine Region in 1756. In the early 1900s, Quinta do Crasto was purchased by Constantino de Almeida, the founder of the famous Constantino Port house. Today, his granddaughter, Leonor Roquette, and her husband Jorge Roquette own and manage the estate, together with their sons, Miguel and Tomás. The Roquette family has invested tremendous time, attention, and resources to rebuild and expand the vineyards and facilities to produce top quality Port and Douro table wines. Vineyard mapping, DNA-matched replanting, a new state-of-the-art wine cellar and centuries of tradition mean that no detail in the winemaking and vineyard management is overlooked.
Quinta do Crasto produces different styles of port and table wines each year. Together with their winemakers and their entire team, they seek to produce year after year wines that display the unique and beautiful characteristics of the Douro, through a tireless devotion to tradition, integrity and excellence.
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.