A guide to tawny styles

Reserve

A good introduction to aged tawny, the Reserve category is defined by the IVDP as a Port that ‘boasts extremely elegant flavours, the perfect combination of the fruitiness of youth and the maturity of age, also apparent in their attractive medium golden-brown colour’. In practice, these wines are about seven years of age.

10 Year Old

Showing more age and finesse than a Reserve, 10 Year Old has seen a rapid increase in sales during recent years. This may explain a rather alarming variation in quality (something we noted at the 2016 Decanter World Wine Awards) with too many unbalanced and rather rustic wines. I have included a rather unusual white in my recommendations (see p64), alongside consistently good tawnies from Burmester, Ferreira and Sandeman that represent the epitome of fine 10 Year Old.

20 Year Old

The apogee of aged tawny, combining freshness, delicacy and the primacy of fruit with secondary savoury-nutty complexity from ageing in wood: this really tests the skill of the blender in the tasting room. Colours may vary according to house style, from tawnypink to pale amber-orange, occasionally with a touch of olive green on the rim. There is currently no shortage of excellent wines in this category.

30 and 40 Year Old

Bottled in tiny quantities, these rarefied wines tend to be richer and sweeter than 20 Year Old, with concentrations sometimes verging on unctuous. It is not uncommon for the wines to be lifted on the nose – a characteristic captured by the Portuguese term vinagrinho. Balance is everything, and having the stocks to draw on is paramount, as well as skill in blending.

Colheita

The Portuguese word colheita means ‘harvest’. The wine must be from a single year, aged for a minimum of seven years in wood before bottling. In practice many are aged for considerably longer, and so a colheita can vary greatly in style – from a mid-deep, relatively youthful, berry fruit-driven wine to the softest, most venerable of tawnies. There are always two dates indicated on the bottle: the year of harvest on the front label and the year of bottling on the back, which gives a clue to the style of the wine.