I recently returned from a vacation to Portugal, which included a few days in the Douro. The vineyards are some of the most spectacular landscapes that I’ve ever seen. Kayaking down the Douro River and climbing around the ancient terraces was a magical experience.
I’ve never been a huge Port drinker, but I do enjoy them from time to time, and now I feel an emotional connection to the wines.
But how to drink them? I typically drink my wine with dinner, and when I’m done eating, I’m usually done drinking as well. Opening some dessert wine after a meal is just not part of my usual routine. But isn’t that how most people enjoy Port?
So how do you work Port into your wine rotation (or any other dessert wine for that matter)? Also, for the vintage stuff, how long can you keep a bottle open before it starts to decline?
If you are opening your Vintages young, they will keep for a few days before they start to lose their vibrancy.
Aged bottles are best reserved for occasions where there are enough people to finish the bottle during the evening. The older the wines are, the less they like air (especially when you have to decant the bottle off the deposit, which introduces quite a lot of O2 into the wine) and especially the very old ones can fade quite noticeably just overnight.
The wines don’t turn undrinkable or bad in any way, they just lose that thing that makes Vintage Port so special. An old VP tastes like a generic old fortified wine the next day.
My wife’s grandmother (like many others I believe) used to keep a re-corked bottle of Port (and Byrrh) in her ambient room temperature bar. You never knew for how long that bottle had been there (weeks? months? years?). That bar could be at 30oC during summer. Vile stuff…
I don’t work it in. We have 85 bottles of Port in the cellar, but have only consumed 2 over the last 18 years of keeping track, and one of those Jonathan drank with a friend while they smoked cigars ahead of the friend’s bachelor party.
I started a thread a few years back about sweet wines in general, and how I have a bunch but almost never open them. Many others admitted to the same situation.
I am a vintage port wine drinker. Have more bottles than I care to admit ( more than a handful of 9 liter bottles of vintage port). I enjoy port while playing poker/cribbage/backgammon with friends to a nice glass in the backyard after returning from a hike. I typically have a cold beer while bbq’ing and port while eating. Scrambled eggs and omelets get a splash of port poured over them a few seconds before coming off the heat.
Don’t look it as a after dinner cordial or a dessert wine. Port goes great with Chinese food, red meats, bold dishes and the standards ( chocolates, cheeses, nuts, foie gras,etc)
Open a 750 ml bottle and decant for sediment, pour off half into a 375 ml bottle , cork bottle and place in fridge. Let other half in decanter breathe as needed. I have decanted a 77 warres port for 6 hours within the past month and drank the 375ml pour off bottle 9 days later both showed great!.
Does this decline happen with other age sweet fortified wines? I’ve got a few old Banyuls and Rivesaltes waiting to be opened and wondering if I should treat them the same way.
I work it in my cooking. I don’t drink it, I don’t like the aromatics or alcohol. When it gets served in tastings by others I usually can appreciate the complex aromatics but I still don’t like it.
But I love Sauternes and serve it with cheese (and there is always a cheese course chez moi). It works with desserts too, of course, but I find it much more suitable for non-sweet food. All that works for port too. But if you never have cheese (or dessert) at the end of a meal it gets a bit more tricky.
As @David_Cohen mentioned, sweet wines work with all kinds of food but I usually find it to be rather difficult to change to other wines after a sweet wine. Hence, only at the end of a multi course meal for me.
No, the thing is that Vintage Ports are aged for a relatively short period of time in oak barrels before they are bottled, so they don’t see that much oxygen at any point. Thus when you open up a bottle of VP, the wine reacts vigorously with oxygen, meaning that compounds that can oxidize get oxidized quite rapidly, leading to quite rapid loss of those vibrant fruit aromatics that are unique to Vintage Port.
Normally fortified wines are made oxidatively, meaning that if there are compounds that can get oxidized are usually quite oxidized already when the wine is bottled. This is why these kinds of wines don’t react noticeably with oxygen when the bottles are opened and can remain quite unchanged for a long time. Especially Madeira - which can be aged oxidatively for up to 100 years in relatively high temperatures doesn’t really give a fig about oxygen when a bottle is opened. The wine has already seen all the oxygen in the world, so a little bit more doesn’t really do anything.
Only the styles that are made in a similar fashion to a VP would be the only fortified wines that don’t keep that well once the wine is opened. Most Banyuls see quite a bit of oxygen, but Banyuls Rimage is stylistivcally quite analogous to a VP so an older Rimage (+20 years) might not be the best choice for a bottle to be sipped slowly over several months. Rivesaltes Grenat is also a style that doesn’t see that much oxygen, but I think they are more analogous to Ruby Ports rather than Vintage Ports, so I’m not sure if they are capable of aging that long. At least I haven’t encountered any older Grenat wines.
We bought some as birth-year wines for our son and daughter, and consequently have more than we need. My wife doesn’t drink much port at all, and prefers something like a 20-year tawny if she does have a bit.
I incorporate LBV’s and Tawny’s during the colder months here. You can open one and they should keep for 2-3 weeks, which allows us to have a bit on consecutive weekends. LBV’s can be excellent cellar defenders in lieu of opening that next bottle! For Vintage Ports, it is usually opened at a wine gathering where there are a number of guests. As Otto said, they will usually keep for 24-48 hours without losing too much.
Noah, we went to Portugal in 2017 and felt the same as you did. Loved the area! We went on a tour of Taylor Fladgate, Graham’s and Cockburn and ended up buying some 2017 Vintage Port when they came out, even though we will be long gone before they are in their prime drinking window, That is how much we enjoyed out trip!
I like 30+ year old vintage ports on occasion. They often crush many entrees, but can work with spicy food – Korean ribs, etc. Otherwise I consume for dessert with blue cheese or chocolate. I don’t find it appropriate in Summer.
I usually drink more Colheita’s than Vintage Port. Colheitas can last a few weeks once open with no issues, in fact they usually pour them out in decanters in Portugal and serve them for weeks.
The only Port I do drink regularly is Niepoort’s Nat Cool Trudy, it has just enough acidity to balance the sweetness and 19.5% which isn’t too bad.
I’m still waiting for the vast majority of my Vintage Ports to reach an appropriate age. I have a handful of older bottles, but never actively pursued backfilling.
Laura and I go through 3 or 4 bottles of Tawny (usually 20 year old) every year, and I break down and open a VP (usually a 375ml while I continue waiting on the 750s) once or twice a year. When I no longer need to get up in the AM for work I will likely drink more Port overall, including my VP. It’s currently limited to either Friday night or Saturday.
I visited the Douro in January, and I was also captivated not only by the natural and the vineyard beauty, but also the people there who we met in the small family wineries.
My sense of it after the visit (and I don’t claim to be an expert here) is that most of the luxury/prestige style Port is made by the huge and usually foreign and/or conglomerate owned Port houses. And I don’t at all mean to imply that they are therefore evil or bad wines or anything, but just that they represent a different lane of Douro wine than the smaller local producers there make.
I think the smaller producers don’t have the resources and facilities to do the extended aging and long-delayed release of the prestige Port wines. They mostly make table wines and then early-drinking Port wines. I think these will tend to be suitable to an “open a bottle and have a small glass every day or two for a couple of weeks” kind of approach. Plus, since those are not expensive wines, you can experiment and see how you like their development without feeling like you might have just wasted some $100 bottle.
Again, I’m not dogging the big Port houses or their wines. It’s awesome for the customer to have access to decades-old Port wines like that at usually still quite reasonable prices. But my visit changed my perspective of that being what the Douro is all or mostly about – there are some interesting different lanes there, and different ways to enjoy the region’s wines.
One interesting experience I had there was, while tasting at Graham’s after a tour, I saw on their BTG tasting list the 1994 Dow Vintage Port, which I’ve owned two bottles of for a long time. So I had an opportunity to try a pour of it and see where those bottles are at without “wasting” one too young.
What I found, at least that glass and for my palate, was a wine which was still relatively simple and blunt. A lot of plummy fruit, sweetness and density, of course, but little of the evolution into the interesting and complex wine I would be looking for. I liked it a lot less than the aged tawnies and Colheitas I tried as my main tasting, and really the two are drastically different experiences.
I’m not sure if it will become what I hoped in another decade or two, or whether I should just stick to tawny/Colheita in the future.