Potpourri of Port wines review

I often get asked the question, “Do like like Shiraz,” or “Do you like Chardonnay,” or something similar.  Recently, I was asked if I like Port.  I do!  But what is Port?  True Port wine or Vinho do Porto comes from the Douro Valley in Portugal.  There are over 100 grape varietals sanctioned for making Port wine.  Additionally, many other countries make Port-styled wines.  With so many differences in the grapes, the regions grown and styles of Port, it is almost impossible to define what Port wine is.  It comes sweet, semi-sweet and dry.  It comes as single vintages (Vintage Port) or Tawney Port which is often multiple vintages aged for several years in wood and blended to provide some interesting characteristics.

2004 Dow Vintage Port croppedThe other evening my brother-in-law and his family were staying with us and we decided to drink some Port wine after dinner.  I started with my regular drinking Port which is currently the 2004 Dow Vintage Port.  I have one bottle of the 1977 Dow Vintage Port (for a special occasion and to drink with great pleasure over a short period of time in the not too distant future).  I also have two bottles of the 2007 Dow Vintage Port which is one of the highest rated vintages ever, but those two bottles will be lying in the cellar for another 20 years or so before I touch them.  The 2004 Dow Vintage Port is a very nice wine.  This wine matured early and is easily drinkable now.  It is fruity and has softened, especially when the bottle has been open for a while.  This wine is very inexpensive ($12 – $15 per bottle in the US and about $25 – $30 per bottle in Australia) and provides for a great-valued drink.  A truly wonderful drink for the money, but should be drunk over the next few years.

Penfolds Grandfather Port croppedWe then tried a bottle of Penfolds Grandfather Tawny Port.  This is a non-vintaged Port blended across eight years with the vintages all being 20 years old or so.  This wine was very, very smooth and had a completely different mouthfeel to the 2004 Dow Vintage Port.  The Penfolds Granfather Tawny Port had a luscious, smooth feeling with caramelized, nutty sugars.  The wine reminded me of the recent Christmas fruit cakes with brandy I had eaten – thick, juicy and sweet.  A completely different style of Port from the 2004 Dow Vintage Port.

Lindemans 1967 Vintage Port croppedWe then opened a bottle of the 1967 Lindemans Vintage Port.  This ismy last bottle and while not quite as good as the 1954 and the 1957 Lindemans Vintage Ports I have had, it is a magnificent wine.  I had some problems getting the cork out being soggy after 35 years in the bottle!  Even the Ah So corkscrew was not able to help and ultimately, I ended up with the cork in the bottle.  Yet, I was able to pour us a glass and we had just experienced our third very different Port that evening!  The 1967 Lindemans Vintage Port was very big with plummy fruit flavors, luscious to the feel on the tongue beautiful, but slightly medicinal smells.

Therefore, when asked if I like Port, the answer is a resounding YES!  I like the wide variety of Ports available from Vintage to Tawny, young and old, but particularly very old (30 years or more).  Ports take on so many different identities with various flavors and styles made from so many different varietals of grapes that it is impossible to classify Port as a single type of wine.  There are many different Ports, but any good Port is a great companion when sitting down in the evening and reading a good book.

 

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013.  Steve Shipley
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How to prepare a 20 year old red wine for drinking

“Just open it and drink it,” many of you would say.  But a 20 year old iconic red wine certainly deserves more care and ceremony than that!  A number of seemingly small steps can make the difference between the wine being ‘passable’ and exceptional.  And it only takes a few more minutes to make it exceptional, so you would be foolhardy if you did not give it a chance!

Granted, the wine will be good or ‘not good’ mostly based on how it has been stored for the last 20 years and what has happened with the micro-oxidation that has gone on in the bottle during that time.  This will be heavily influenced by the cork quality and if it has been faithful or not.

While you are no longer in control of the previous storage or the cork quality, there are four things you have control over in preparing the wine for drinking, all which may influence if the wine is suitable or not:

  • Removing wine from cellar / storage, stand up-right and let rise to room temperature
  • Choosing to use an Ah So cork remover as the cork will be fragile (any cork after 12 – 15 years tends to become saturated and soggy (unless the cork grain is very tight) and is at risk of breaking apart.  See picture in my post ‘A disappointment, but one moves on!’) of a crumbled cork from a 17 year old bottle of wine.)
  • Decanting the wine, avoiding the use of a filter or aerator if possible.  If required, use a filter, but never an aerator for a 20 year old wine
  • Let decant for only 30 – 60 minutes.  Then re-bottle if not already consumed, and  consuming the wine within several hours

You should remove the wine 3 – 12 hours before you plan on opening it.  By allowing it to come to room temperature slowly before opening the bottle will put less stress on the wine as you decant it.  And standing it up allows any free sediment to settle to the bottom of the bottle, potentially removing the need to filter the wine while decanting.

Perfectly preserved cord after 20 years!

The Ah So cork remover is far better for delicate corks than more traditional cork screws as it provides a grip on the outside of the cork (instead of drilling down through a soft cork center) and also ensures the cork has been ‘twisted’ to separate the cork from the bottle.  Over time, the sugar in wine can crystallize, attaching the cork to the bottle and make it difficult to separate and remove.

Now if you have no sediment and no cork floating in the wine, you can decant slowly without using a filter or aerator.  If you do have some indication of sediment or cork, then use a filter but not an aerator.  The structure of an older wine becomes very fragile and will start to separate in a short period of time, further losing fruit flavor and its integrated texture, and an aerator worsen this effect noticeably.  (While I am a big fan of aerating most wines, never aerate a ‘museum’ wine.

Let the wine decant for a short period of time, maybe 30 – 60 minutes.  This old a wine does not usually require much more air to make it ready to drink.  You usually just want to get any older smells entrapped in the bottle out and let the wine breath a little.  If you are not going to drink the wine immediately, then re-bottle it, but make sure to consume within several hours.  This old a bottle of wine will not last the day without some deterioration.

There are a few exceptions to this rule for very robust, built to last wines, but this is the general rule.  You can test a sip or two every 15 minutes to see if the wine continues to improve or not and once it shows no further sign of improvement, then re-bottle.  Some wines such as an older Penfold Grange and the 1987 Lindeman Pyrus require a long time to decant to reach maximum potential.

I used the above process to open a bottle of the 1992 Lindemans Pyrus.  This is a beautifully-aged wine made of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Franc.  This type of blend has great potential to last a long time and beautifully mature in terms of the complexity and integration of flavors.  Thanks to the cork being in perfect condition, the wine is exquisite!  It would have been slightly better 3 – 5 years ago and has lost just a touch of its fruit flavors, but still very flavorful.  It has big plum flavors with a trace of tobacco which I really enjoy in an aged red wine.

The structure of the wine has held up well, but is fragile and will not last long.  Therefore, I need to drink this wine today.  I am craving a pizza to go with it, or some nice lamb, but we planned to have leftover black bean soup, some corn-on-the-cob, and a salad for dinner.  But it seems almost sinful to have this great wine with a spicy black bean soup!

Cheese/meat plate with 1992 Lindemans Pyrus and Rockmellon

Therefore, we decided to make a last moment change (as the soup, salad and corn-on-the-cob will last until tomorrow) and made up a cheese and salami / prosciutto plate instead which will suffice for dinner and be more enjoyable with the wine than black bean soup!

I am now 2/3rds the way through the bottle (and finished with this post!), so you do not need to be concerned if I finish the wine today or not!

[Post-writing update:  I stand corrected.  I saved the other 1/3 rd of the bottle for a day later, and it was still surprisingly good.  If a wine is very well crafted such as the 1992 Lindemans Pyrus was, then there is less of a concern about it deteriorating quickly.  This wine is still a star the day after opening!]

A disappointment, but one moves on!

Last night, my lovely bride and I drove to the Hunter Valley and arrived in time for dinner at the Blue Thai restaurant which we really enjoy.  The food is great and the crowd is certainly interesting and entertaining as the restaurant abuts a trailer and camping park.  It is a BYO restaurant, which is a concept I always like!  There were several cartons of box wine sitting on other tables (why come to the Hunter Valley and get box wine?!?!) and I expect there were not many other bottles over $10 in the restaurant that night.

Yet, Thai food has such tremendous flavors and deserves to be paired with good wine.  We usually bring a Gewurztraminer, Semillon or Riesling.  Tonight we brought along a bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide Hills Semillon Trial Bin.  I have four bottles of this, but had not had much interest in trying one as it was an inexpensive wine I purchased back in 1997 in Melbourne.  It had not been cared for well either in that it made a trip across the ocean to the US in 1998 when I moved back there, and then a trip back home in 2000 when I moved here permanently.  Fortunately, most of the wines that made the journey over and back did not suffer much (the better ones were stored in Styrofoam cases) , but some of the cheaper ones were affected.

Recently, I have come to realize that the 1995 Adelaide Hills Trial Bin was one of the wines that was an experiment as a possibility for Penfolds White Grange (according the the public, not Penfolds) which ultimately resulted in the Yatarnna Bin 144 Chardonnay.  Plus some of the wine auction houses I was talking with expressed interest in selling this wine at auction and that peaked my curiosity.  I decided it was worth trying a bottle to see if it was still good.  After all, it was selling for between $25 – $30 per bottle on the secondary market.

Crumbled cork

Halliday reviewed this wine a long time ago and said it was drinkable until about 2003 and here I am thinking about trying it almost a decade after that.  Yet, I have had many aged Semillons that have really stood the test of time.  However the bottle I opened last night, had not!  It was unfortunately corked.  I used the standard cork screw from the restaurant, but the cork just crumbled.  I then drove home to get my Ah So cork screw.  The Ah So cork screw is about the only way to get old cork out of an old bottle.  It is designed to be able to get old and soggy corks out of the bottle, and I may have had some luck had I started with this, but the cork was so soggy and cushy that I could not get a good grip on it.  It was the first time ever that I was not able to remove a cork with the Ah So, and had to push it into the bottle.

I was still hopeful because the wine had a beautiful golden color to it, and their was no obvious fault when visualizing the wine.  However, it had lost much of its flavor and had a metallic taste to it.  It tasted like someone had squeezed a melon onto a piece of sheet metal and licked it.  (I am imagining this is what it would have tasted like – I have not actually done this!)  You could tell this was a fine wine in its time, but had oxidized too much.  I still managed a few sips with dinner to try to figure out what it would have been like without the fault, but we left 2/3rds of the bottle and mostly had water with dinner.

I am hopeful that the remaining three bottles of this wine may have traveled better than this one did.  Cork variability can be quite large.  Recently about two weeks apart, I had two bottles of the 2003 Blueberry Hills Pinot Noir and the second one was significantly better than the first one (as described in post).  Since both Pinot Noirs had been stored properly and in exactly the same manner, the difference could only be attributable to the difference in cork structure.  Therefore, I will try each bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide hills Semillon Trial Bin and hopefully one or two of the remaining three bottles will be real gems!