A TAWNY PORT IS MADE FOR FIRESIDE SIPPING
Dark days and cloistered COVID routines a chance to explore these unique vintages
Cold rainy weather is the late fall and early winter forecast, making it easier to turn to a wine category that sits well outside the mainstream: fortified wood ports.
There are two main styles of fortified wines, tawny ports and vintage port, and they are easy to tell apart.
Vintage ports are the dense, purple-black wines with big black fruit flavours and rich tannins that spend less than two years in wood before resting in bottle for decades.
Tawny ports spend most of their life in large old wooden barrels, the moniker a nod to its yellow-brown “tawny” colour.
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 where they become a blend of various wood-aged 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 a nutty finish.
Wines to look for include: Cockburn Special Reserve ($18.99), Warre's Warrior Finest Reserve ($24.99), Graham Six Grapes Reserve ($26.99), Fonseca Terra Prima Organic Reserve ($26.99) and Fonseca Bin 27 Reserve.
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, essentially oxidizing in wooden barrels. The longer they age, the more colour and fruit they lose. Still, the good news is an open bottle can last days or weeks, so you can sip a glass or two a day without worrying about finishing the bottle, and it will keep without any perceptible change in the wine's flavours — hence its easy-to-use twist-out and twist-in cork stopper.
The next level 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. Making a wine that will not be sold for 40 years takes an excessive amount of planning, and one that pays little heed to fashion or demand.
You can expect an exacting standard of quality measured by law and repeated without fail year in and year out. Wines to look for include: Warre's 10-yearold tawny Otima ($27.99), Graham 10-year-old tawny (38.99), Fonseca 10-year-old tawny ($36.99), Sandeman 20-year-old tawny ($63.99), Taylor Fladgate 30-year-old tawny ($145.99) and Taylor Fladgate 40-year-old tawny ($190.99).
Perhaps the most intriguing category of wood ports is the colheitas, the Portuguese word for “harvest” (pronounced Yeah-taws). You will find it on single-vintage tawny that must age a minimum of seven years in wood before bottling by law. It's bottled upon order, so for example, a 1975 colheita could be bottled a dozen or more times over 45 years.
As the barrels disappear and the wine spends longer and longer in the remaining wood, its flavour profile changes, varying the style of the colheita from bottling to bottling.
The oldest can be the softest, most sublime, unique examples of fortified wood ports. 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 its fans. Again they will keep forever.
Colheita selections in BCL stores feature several years, including 1997, 1970, 1969, 1968, 1966 and Carvalhas' Very Old Tawny Memories from the 19th Century ($4,200).
Almost all ports make it easy to celebrate significant dates or anniversaries in your life because we know if stored properly, they keep forever. For those new to tawny ports, have a look at the entry-level bottles beginning at about $25 and work your way up. Add a book, a window view or a seat by the fireplace and some spiced nuts, and you are ready to take on the weather and a pandemic.