KPB
Posts: 4649
Joined: 11/25/2012
From: Ithaca, New York
Status: offline
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I don’t agree about the greatest vintages. For me 1955 and 1970, then 1977. Since then I’ve been excited about 1994, 2003, 2011 and 2016 but only time will really tell!
I also don’t agree with your criticism of the term “vintage”. A port house can’t use this designation very frequently, so deciding to put it on a label is a major thing. I believe the limit is three times per decade. It isn’t marketing, per se. It genuinely sends us a signal that for this particular producer, this is an exceptionally strong year.
I should add that my experience is mostly focused on Graham, Taylor, Fonseca, Dow, Noval a few others, which is a long list but not remotely as extensive as for professionals who attend port tasting events and have tried thousands of wines (I'm at around 500 bottles of VP consumed total, and in fact 125 of them are just the Graham 1985, which obviously counts as just 1). So very possibly people who taste more broadly end up with a perspective on vintage years that wouldn't apply to someone who is as limited in their focus as me. For my wife and me, it really comes down to what we might enjoy sipping on a cold fall or winter night, and we have never really gone out trying to taste everything or anything like that.
But within these producers we definitely have tasted a lot of vintages, at least back to around 1945. In the end we decided we actually prefer our VP a bit less delicate and shifted deliberately away from ancient stuff -- I don't think I have anything older than 1970 right now, and when we run out of 1970 and 1977, I won't be restocking those even though the two vintages have decades of life remaining. The really old bottles just are very expensive and even though we love them, the bottom line is that they aren't so amazing that it is worth thousands of dollars to buy more!
But this also limits the range of experience I've had with other producers (Warre, for example -- I just don't love their style, but maybe I've never had their best VP at the ideal age).
One remark I'll end on is that if you get into older VPs, buy them in mixed lots at auction. Very few people go to the trouble to see what a mixed lot of VP contains so there can be gems buried in excellent but less renowned parcels -- you might find six Quinta da Noval and one of the six turns out to be Nacionale, for example. Very much worth the effort. And then if you also aim for less famous vintages you often discover genuinely amazing bottles. Port handles heat and other cellaring problems rather well, so even bottles with a little evidence of leakage can be fine (yet will generally be really cheap!). Given that a 50 year old cork is definitely going to be spongy or bone dry, that sequence is very common -- great bottle, some leakage, costs almost nothing, and yet the wine is glorious!
The other comment is that old VP sometimes does become corked. Oddly, something about the way VP is made sort of absorbs or binds most of the TCA, leaving a slightly minty character and maybe slightly muting the wine, but not to a point you wouldn't enjoy it. So the rate of defects in very old bottles is quite low, unless you consider even this to be a massive defect.
< Message edited by KPB -- 10/23/2023 6:48:51 AM >
_____________________________
Ken Birman
The Professor of Brettology
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RE: Port Season is officially OPEN! - 
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