Maynards 10 Year Old Tawny Port, Douro, Portugal NV (£10.99, Aldi) In the popular imagination, port is a vividly coloured tipple – a ruby-purple liquid that gets passed around high tables by florid-faced men in Victorian illustrations. The tonal caricature isn’t far off: it’s certainly true of most styles of Port today, from the cheaper ruby, reserve and late bottled vintage, to classic vintage port. But there’s another increasingly popular style, with an altogether more restrained appearance – one that shows its age rather more visibly than even the oldest of vintage ports. Tawny port is more immediately mellow in flavour and texture too. That’s because it’s been aged, in the case of the super value Maynards, for an average of ten years in wooden casks (vintage port is allowed a maximum two and a half years in barrel or steel tank before it is bottled), giving it its cosseting softness and dusky, fruitcakey flavours.
Graham’s 10 Year Old Tawny Port, Douro, Portugal NV (£20.49, Waitrose) The most common age statement used by Port shippers for quality wood-aged ports is 10 Year Old. That’s an average of all the wines in the blend: the recipe for a wine such as Graham’s textbook example, with its genteel figginess and easygoing nutty richness, contains wines that are both much younger and much older than a decade. It’s up to the blender to maintain a consistent style from batch to batch. The emphasis on those blending skills – of knowing your ingredients, and being right on top of your inventory of barrels of various ages – takes the art of tawny port-making rather closer in spirit to whisky or brandy production. And a bottle of an older tawny – such as the immeasurably complex, rich and resonant Taylor’s 30 Year Old Tawny Port (£69, Waitrose) – will match the finest of single malts or Cognacs as a late-night, fireside sipper.
Kopke Colheita Vintage Port, Douro, Portugal 1999 (from £32.99, Waitrose Cellar; Hedonism) Not all great wood-aged ports are average age-dated blends. Occasionally you’ll see the Portuguese word for harvest, colheita, and a year on the label. That means the wine has been taken from a single vintage, like vintage port. But, unlike vintage port, it’s been aged in previously used oak casks for at least seven years before being bottled. By the time it’s out for sale in the world, then, its characteristics are much closer to a tawny port than a vintage, and it’s ready for drinking immediately. The best represent some of the finest ports around. As a Christmas treat, Kopke’s 20-year-old beauty is silky and ethereally aromatic. Or look for Quinta do Noval, whose latest Colheita from 2005 (£50) is beautifully poised between richness and deftness and just coming into the same stockists as the more powerful but equally lovely 2003 (Selfridges, Corney & Barrow).
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