Winemaker Notes
These are Ports from a single year which age to full maturity in seasoned oak casks and display the year of harvest on the label. Taylor Fladgate has made a limited release, each year, of a Single Harvest Port made 50 years previously. The seventh in the series is the 1970 Single Harvest.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
This may be my most exceptional tasting experience of the year: a 50-year-old warhorse that dances like a newborn colt. Fresh and juicy, with complexity and layers of flavor, including bright, pure, orange marmalade–scented fruit; dried fig; toasty, mature rancio; and vanilla. Sweet but racy, with pronounced refinement. You have to kiss a lot of frogs in this business, but this is one of those experiences that makes it all worthwhile.
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Decanter
Pale red-mahogany in colour with an olive-green tinge to the rim. Gloriously lifted and maderised on the nose with a touch of sultana, molasses and roasted coffee. Rich and beautifully intense on the palate; a smooth, slightly syrupy resonance offset by a lithe streak of acidity, which keeps the wine fresh all the way through. Long and languorous on the finish, with lovely toasty, malty complexity. Superbly laidback and hedonistic.
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Wine Spectator
This is extremely refined, with a sleek-edged mix of green tea, date, white ginger, toasted sesame, bitter almond and bitter orange notes curling through, laced with flashes of salted caramel, singed alder and sandalwood. There's a dry, nervy spine through the finish, encased in a more flattering glycerol feel that adds amazing length, leaving echoes of all the elements in its wake. A special wine.
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.