Community Tasting Note
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drwine2001 wrote:
October 15, 2011 - Pilgrimage to a Wine Mecca: Our very creative and somewhat playful sommelier tasted us blind on this wine to kick off the line up of wines we'd selected. Light tulip yellow. Some high, mature tones. What the heck is this anyway-mature Riesling? Nope, its waxy texture and weight are more like Chenin or Semillon. Excellent acidity, earthy finish with a bit of funk. Nothing in the way of definable fruit character, just essence of mature white wine. Well, it turned out to be just your basic 38 year old Portuguese white (per the label on the neck of the bottle which noted its 1973 bottling date). Incredible. Who was buying much less cellaring this stuff way back then? By the way, the sommelier has tested the tasting acumen of multiple professionals with this wine and "Nobody has ever gotten close". Sadly, we were not the first, but we did hazard a collective guess about it being from the '70s, mostly because we figured that it had to be older than we honestly thought! As much as we enjoyed the classic great wines that followed, getting a chance to taste an odd rarity like this was equally fantastic.
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1 Comment
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Claw Dee Puss commented:
3/14/17, 2:44 AM - Well I ran across your note when I recently acquired, at auction, 3 bottles of a very similar looking red.
Your comment "Well, it turned out to be just your basic 38 year old Portuguese white (per the label on the neck of the bottle which noted its 1973 bottling date)" intrigued me, since I could see no vintage on the bottle.
My bottles have labels saying "Portaria Nº 847/73 de 4/12/73" which I'm pretty sure would be what you saw on your bottle. "Portaria" is an ordinance or law, and the number and date serve to specify exactly which law.
Some research led me to this...
https://dre.tretas.org/dre/27256/portaria-847-73-de-4-de-dezembro
which refers to the label you mentioned (well, to be sure the label on my bottles).
That's all in Portuguese, of course, but, the summary says "Define the characteristics of the label ... utilized on bottled wine products" - it's an early labeling law, covering sizes and even how much they cost to buy (I should point out that the $ symbol there is escudos, not US dollars!).
So that "1973" isn't actually a bottling date. Of course, the wine could not have been bottled BEFORE that date.
Just as the Port "selo" (seal) regulations changed, allowing one to date "older" ports (http://www.theportforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=1876), the key to dating this wine is probably when the regulations were CHANGED to something else. Alas, so far, I have been unable to find out exactly when, or even if, that has happened - I have a couple of 2003s with a similar looking label.
One final point - in CT your wine is shown as "Douro". To be sure it was bottled there, but my selo says Dão, the name says "Dão", and my bottle, which is entirely in Portuguese (yours was obviously an import), says it was made in the demarcated Dão region.