TAWNY PORTS GREAT WITH BOOK BY THE FIRE

Portugal’s favoured tipple comes pre-aged, spending years oxidizing in wooden barrels

Today we turn our attention to the less than mainstream category of fortified wood ports.

There are two main styles of fortified wines — tawny port and vintage port — and they are easy to tell apart.

Vintage ports are mostly dense, purple-black wines with big black fruit flavours and rich tannins. They spend very little time in wood, less than two years, but often rest in bottle for decades.

Our interest today is in the other port style, the one the Portuguese most enjoy drinking themselves: tawny ports.

Although all ports start out thinking they can become part of a magnificent bottle of vintage port, chances are they will end up in the tawny port stream.

A tawny is always a blend of various ports from a wide number of years, with the average age listed on the label. Entry level tawny is termed ‘reserve” and many boast the name or brand of famous port houses. They are much lighter in colour, often translucent, with a red, amber orange colouring and flavours of raisiny fruit, caramel, brown spices and often a nutty finish.

The longer they age the more colour and fruit they lose.

The next level up is the 10, 20, 30 and 40-year-old tawnies where complexity and nuance are the game. It takes years to come to know these wines and discover their stories. When you think about it planning these wines decades in advance, is a highly sophisticated and complex job, one that pays little heed to fashion or demand.

The Portuguese word for ‘harvest’ is ‘colheita’ (pronounced Cool-YEAH-taws), and you see it on single vintage tawny that by law must age a minimum of seven years in wood before bottling. It’s bottled upon order, so for example, a 1980 Colheita could be bottled a dozen or more times over 47 years. As the barrels disappear and the wine spends longer and longer in the remaining wood its flavour profile changes varying the style of a single harvest Colheita from bottling to bottling. The oldest can be the softest, most sublime examples of fortified, wood ports and truly unique.

Another peculiarity of this marvellous wine is, unlike vintage port, a wine you need to drink the same day you open it, tawny comes pre-aged after spending all its life exposed to air oxidizing in wooden barrels. Translation: you can open a bottle of tawny port and pour yourself a glass daily, over two or three weeks and not really see or taste any perceptible change in the wine’s flavours, especially if you keep the newly opened bottle in a refrigerator.

Here’s a quick look at the range of tasty tawny labels in the market. You will find five more specific recommendations in our weekend picks.

We begin with the specialty offerings: Tawnys aged 10, 20, 30, and 40 years in barrel. In fact, each level is a mix of years that on average match the year on the label. It’s more about the taste and style of the wine then the actual year count. In other words, a 10-year-old tawny has a specific taste as do the 20, 30 and 40-year-old bottles.

Many believe 20 years to be the perfect amount of time for a tawny to live in wood but each level has specific nuances and fans.

In B.C., you can sample most of the decades individually with labels from Taylor Fladgate, Fonseca, Graham, Warre, Sandeman and Quinta do Boeira to name a few. If you want a surprise a tawny loving friend with a gift, there is a magical Century of Port ($279.99) package from Taylor Fladgate featuring single bottles of the 10, 20, 30 and 40-year-old tawny ports.

Colheita selections in BCL stores feature several years including: 1999, 1967, 1966, 1965, 1957 and even 1863. I’ll leave the math to you but you can see these individual, single vineyard Colheitas make it easy to celebrate significant dates or anniversaries in your life.

Prices range from $190 to $4000. If you just want to get to know tawny have a look at some of the entry levels bottles beginning at about $25. Simply add a book, a fireplace and some spiced nuts and you are ready for winter.