The Auswine Forum

This masteful blending of shiraz and cabernet sauvignon was only recently disgorged. Accordingly, being one with a penchant for fortifieds above other wines, I decided to order a few 375ml bottles.

It carries a darkness resembling the colour of, say, a Seppelts Grand Tokay, and has a slight but noticeable unctuosity that I have seldom seen in a tawny port, or any other port for that matter.

Initially closed for a brief time it opened to a curtain of sweetness with a touch of lanolin and a faint air of a mechanic's garage (the latter description being far from a pejorative characteristic, so long as it remains "faint"). The lanolin later became more pronounced but not overpowering. The initial sweetness, which also was never overpowering, later subsided a little.

On the palate this wine sings a long and balanced song. It has a kind of oldness in its taste if that is possible (and it is to me but, again, this is not a pejorative feature if in balance with the wine, as it was) which to me seemed to speak of days of yore, similar to when one walks into a venerable old home which exudes a smell of history or of something long gone. If you're lucky, you might feel overwhelmed and privileged to be in such a place.

That is how I felt when drinking this wine: privileged to be savouring it. It carries a taste of dried figs and quince and even (dare I say it) cranberries, never overbearing or overpowering but giving me just a nuance of their characteristics, replete with a classic and long rancio finish. The alcohol, too, was in harmony with the fruit, with an acknowledged presence but no presence of hotness. Needless to repeat, the finish was long and lasted quite a while after each sip.

It occurred to me, as I contemplated each sip, that I preferred this even to the Chambers Rare Tokay I had recently, however I concede immediately that this is an unfair comparison (a bit like comparing the best apple I have ever tasted to the best pear I have ever tasted) but purely from a preferential point of view, I would prefer this wine. Of course, that's not to say that I would reject another taste of a Chambers Rare if someone honoured me with a taste of it.

I questioned one matter as soon as I saw this wine: is it possible to have a vintage tawny port? I was under the impression that the very nature of a tawny port excluded an ability to emanate from any single vintage. I would be grateful to receive any members' thoughts on this matter.


PJ.

Wow, comparing it to a Chambers Rare anything is impressive indeed, must be some wine, drooool, must try to get some. Excellent and enjoyable notes, thanks.

Regarding 'vintage' tawnies - I was under the impression it was all in the making of the wine. Once a tawny always a tawny (ie. no longer ages in the bottle, just loses freshness) yet a vp will carry on ageing in bottle and fade once opened.

Thanks for your kind remarks Mark.

I thought that a tawny, by definition, could not be a vintage wine, but I have learned something.

PJ.

I think the vintage either refers to

1) The vintage of the actual barrel like that of seppelt 100 year old para liqueur port, or
2) The vintage of the actual bottle (a blend of a number of vintages)

According to JH, tawny actually can age (mostly by evaporation) and research has shown that the sugar concentration peaks when the wines reach 50-75 years of age; acid at 50 years. These happen when over 2/3 of the original volume of wine is lost by evaporation.
For example, the 1894 100 yo para liqueur port has 16.25 degree baume, 25.2% alcohol, 10.8 g acid, and 3.68 pH.
I have only had the chance to smell one of those (during the seppelt tour), and the difference between a young and an old one is amazing.

Alan

I can't see any reason why a tawny can't be made from grapes of a single vintage, although it obviously is inconsistent with the solera style used for some wines.

By the way, I looked on the McW website and couldn't find any mention of this wine. Where can it be found, and what does it cost?

Kieran

Alan and Kieren, thanks to both of you for adding to my paltry knowledge on this subject.

Kieren, this was only available at cellar door or by mail.

It was priced at $25.00 per 375ml.

When I compare it to some of the botrytis dessert wines prices around $20.00 retail (which I also love but which, in the main, are rather disappointing) I was quite happy with my purchase. I also purchased a liqueur verdhello which I shall taste over the weekend and of which I shall apprise you next week. I prefer to taste these things over a few days to see how they are holding up.

Best,

PJ.

A vintage dated tawny is quite possible, and can be made from wines of a single year. the "Tawny" refers to what happens to the grapes: they are aged for an extended period in barrel, where a vintage port is aged in bottle.

I also understood tawnys often have the fortifying spirit added earlier, effectively stopping the ferment and leaving more residual sugar. More spirit has to be added than for a vintage to get the alcohol to 20odd percent. The flipside of the asme story is that vintage port tends to ferment through further, spirit is added later and in lower quantities, before it gets to the bottle.

Has anyone else heard this story to verify it or otherwise?

cheers

Andrew

This is an article from Wine Spectator.

January 31, 1996

Tasting Tawny Port
Challenging to make, wonderful to drink after the meal
By James Suckling


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Fine, aged tawny remains one of Port's best-kept secrets. Nothing can compare to the intensely concentrated yet delicate flavors of a Port aged for decades in cask. It's little wonder that it's the preferred post-meal drink for most members of the Port trade. A fine old tawny can be so hard to find and is so seldom publicized that it makes you wonder if Port producers actually want us to overlook this category of fortified wine completely. That leaves more for them to consume themselves.

Well-aged tawnies are without a doubt the most difficult Ports to produce and certainly the most costly--especially such rarities as 20-year-old, 30-year-old and older. Compare vintage Port to tawny and you can easily understand the challenge. To produce a vintage, Port shippers select their best lots of wine from a top year and bottle them after two years in cask; they age in the bottle. By comparison, aged tawnies are blends bottled after years of aging in the shippers' cellars, which costs money, and the blends can be extremely complex, using dozens of wines.

"These aged tawnies are definitely the most challenging to make," said Peter Symington, the winemaker for Graham, Dow and Warre. His family owns all three of these shippers as well as Quarles Harris, Gould Campbell and Smith Woodhouse. "What's most important is that they have to be good wines from the beginning. It's my job to find the best wines and later blend them for these tawnies."

Most Port shippers make their blends in one of two ways. Some rely on a mod- ification of the solera system used in making Sherry, casks of blends topped off with younger wines. To produce tawnies, shippers select casks that contain wine with an average age of 10 or 20 years. Their style or age is maintained through tasting and periodically topping up the barrels with old and young wines as part is bottled or lost through evaporation.

The other blending method, which is more difficult, takes several wines from various vintages and incorporates them into a final blend. This may include two or three dozen different wines, similar to the way a Champagne house makes its non-vintage blend.

A tawny designated as a 10-, 20- or 30-year-old is a blend with an average age and does not note the absolute age of the wine. This is similar to what premium Scotch producers do.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what blending method a Port house uses as long as what is bottled is the best quality--and in most cases old tawnies are superlative quality.

In early November Wine Spectator organized a tasting in New York to assess a range of aged tawnies currently available in the United States. We looked at all types of tawnies with 10 years of age or more including vintage-dated tawnies, called colheitas in Portugal.

Overall, we were impressed with the quality of the group. These are clearly some of the great dessert wines of the world, offering an amazing intensity of aroma and flavor as well as fabulous texture. In Portugal, an old tawny traditionally comes after a fine bottle of vintage Port or accompanies desserts such as fruitcake or custard pudding. A lighter, sweeter style than vintage Port, tawny even goes well with chocolate.

In our blind tasting we continually found ourselves using such words as honey, toffee, butterscotch, fruitcake, cedar and nuts to describe these wines --terms which may be used with a vintage Port only after 40 or 50 years of bottle age.

In essence, what a Port shipper does for consumers is mature the wine before it is bottled and sold. Rather than having to wait decades for a Port to mellow in the bottle to reach such a level of polish and finesse, you can simply buy a bottle of aged tawny and enjoy. Granted, the experience is not exactly the same as a well-aged vintage. Great tawnies lack the fresh fruit character and round texture of a superb vintage Port. But the same harmony and class, only achieved through years of maturation, is evident in the glass.

Take, for example, our top wine, Niepoort's 1983 Colheita. We gave it 95 points. The wine seduces you with its fabulous array of floral and dried fruit flavors and a hint of nuts. Medium-bodied and very sweet, it shows great balance and an ultralong aftertaste. The Ramos-Pinto Quinta do Bom-Retiro 20 years old NV is nearly as impressive at 93 points and shows a marvelously complex character of truffles, honey, ceda r and tobacco, not to mention its full body and sweetness on the palate. Other tawnies to consider include: Niepoort Tawny Port Colheita 1976 (93), Graham 10 years old NV (91), Niepoort Colheita 1963 (91), Sandeman 20 years old NV (91), Niepoort 20 years old NV (91), Ramos-Pinto 30 years old NV (90) and Ramos-Pinto Colheita 1937 (90). Prices range from $24 a bottle for the Graham 10-year-old to $200 for the '37 Ramos-Pinto.

In general, we were most impressed with tawnies that showed their age yet remained vibrant and sweet. Ports that seemed too fruity or too tannic or astringent were marked down in the tasting. Extreme fruitiness or tannins shouldn't come through in a Port that is supposedly 10 years old or more.

The tawnies of Niepoort and a few others showed what we were looking for. "All our aged tawnies must have the freshness but they must also show their age," said Dirk van der Niepoort, who now runs his family's centuries-old Port house. "You must be careful in your blending. If you are not careful, your wines can appear disjointed, where the old character and young fruit does not balance well."

Although we still gave good scores to wines that seemed slightly too fresh, some people may prefer this style. Some Port shippers such as Taylor Fladgate and Fonseca intentionally make their older tawnies this way. However, most houses have moved away from overly "refreshing" their tawnies with a percentage of young Port to give them a fruitier, slightly drier character.

"About five or six years ago, we had some rather negative publicity on our old tawnies and made an effort to change the style," admitted Symington. "Our wines were on the dry side, so we went for more sweetness. At the end of the day, we are here to provide people what they want to drink, and more and more people seem impressed with sweeter tawnies."

Regardless of the sweetness of the Ports we tasted, we found two themes in our tasting. First, we discovered that it made little sense in most cases to pay a premium for tawnies with more than 20 years of age. In many cases, as with the Niepoort 1983 and Graham 10-year-old, you can get just as much pleasure from a relatively young tawny. Second, we found that colheitas, the vintage tawnies, are underappreciated. These are wonderful fortified wines and should be viewed in the same light as top vintage Ports.

"These have always been some of our very best wines," said Niepoort, who is the first to admit that he takes the most pride in his aged tawnies, even more than his vintage Ports. "In a vintage year, we always made a little less in a vintage Port and put the rest into the colheita as well. This means you are getting some of our very best wines. Otherwise, if you put a second-class wine in a colheita, you're getting a second-class colheita."

For years, some members of the Port trade have tried to eliminate the category altogether; they argued that it confused the consumer. They maintained that when consumers bought a vintage-dated tawny, many did so in the belief that it was a true vintage Port. Luckily, their misguided ideas have not been successful. Colheitas can be wonderful, just like any other well-matured, well-made tawny.


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Hope this is useful,
MM.

Tahbilk produce a 750ml "late-bottled vintage port" that's effectively a vintage tawny, as well as their NV port, both $24.95. Currrent release is '95 though I'm fairly sure that the '91 I bought was released 10 years after vintage. Drunk a '92 about 18 months(?) ago. Remember it as a lighter style, though more interesting than the NV I'd tried a while before it.

daz

Out of interest, I have brought a bottle of Seppelt Para Single Vintage Tawny Port (1982). The following is from the information sheet:

"The 1982 single vintage tawny is made entirely from a single vintage... is a reflection of the weather and growing conditions through the summer and during the harvest of that year."

and

"Your vintage tawny port has been bottled after long barrel maturation and is drinking at its peak now. As such it does not require any further bottle maturation... (however) if you choose to cellar your bottle beyond the bottling year your Seppelt Para will slowly develop bottle maturation characteristics... Unlike most table wines Seppelt Para Liqueur should be store in an upright position."

The port itself? Oh, its a very good drink and suprisingly spicy, although the spirit is sticking out a bit too much for my liking.

Hope this helps.

Alan