Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
Aromas of balsamic, mahogany, Georgian furniture and dried fruits. Salted dried almonds. Medium-bodied, very sweet. Sultanas. Figs. Yet fresh and intensely flavored with a long, long finish. Love the finish. Salted caramel. Drink or hold.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The NV 50 Year Old Tawny Port is a field blend bottled with a bar-top cork in 2022 and with 158 grams of residual sugar. Mature, with dark chocolate nuances, this is rich, deep and sensationally delicious. The concentration is exceptional too. Then, there's the long, long finish, filled with fruit and sugar. It is irresistible, in addition to being nuanced and complex. It's young enough so that it is never just a curiosity. The fruit is certainly not cracking.
-
Wine Spectator
A bird of a different feather, this sports a range of date, mulled plum and persimmon fruit flavors that are curvaceous in feel, allied to a racy green tea and hazelnut spine. Picks up singed white sesame, walnut husk, alder smoke and sandalwood along the way. Reveals terrific tension between the viscous and nervy sides from start to 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.