A great privilege to be able to try this tawny Port, dating back to the 1850s. Taylor’s have acquired two pipes of it (a pipe is 600 litres, but with an older wine like this the barrels won’t be full), and are releasing it this December, at a price tag of £2500 a bottle. It’s [...]
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Vintage Port is one of the world’s great wines. It’s also relatively affordable compared with other great wines. But there’s an even better bargain in single-quinta Ports from shoulder vintages – those that might have been declared had they not been adjacent to already-declared years. 2008 was a really good vintage in the Douro, but most [...] This morning I headed into London to run a Sherry and Port session for Hakkasan’s (high-end London restaurant) staff training. It was an interesting class, and I was introducing most of the attendees (the majority of who are young people with English as a second language) to the wonderful world of these fortified wines for [...] I’ve been browsing a few old books online, and came across a couple of nice quotes on Port and Portuguese wines from a late 19th Century text: ‘The mode of making port wine is extremely unclean, and the proceedings are very crude and elementary; nevertheless, so good a product is obtained that its faults are, as [...] I have some Vintage Port from 2008 open at the moment. First up, two with a sort of family resemblance (Christian Seely is involved in both). Quinta do Noval has, over recent vintages, established itself as one of the top Douro properties. Romaneira is one to watch: a fantastically situated Quinta only recently renovated and [...]
Making Port wine: traditional and modern approaches from Jamie Goode on Vimeo. I’m a big fan of Port, but I recognize that the Port industry is not best known for its innovation. Shackled by the weight of tradition, and restricted to seasonal sales, it’s a sector in need of some new ideas. There’s pink Port, of course, which I find a bit odd, but which has the [...] I spent today in Vila Nova de Gaia with Sogevenius, a Port and wine company who own the brands Calem, Barros, Burmester and Kopke. The two winemakers, Francisco Goncalves (table wines) an Pedro Sa (Ports) took me through a tasting, of which the highlights were the old Ports. Burmester Colheita 1937 was sensational, and the Kopke [...] There are two major styles of Port. The first is Ruby (a category including Vintage, Single Quinta, LBV, Crusted, Vintage Character and Ruby) – wines aged for a relatively short time in larger wood, and then bottled with lots of fruit. The second is Tawny, wines aged for much longer in wood (usually in 600 [...] Did some staff training for London restaurant Hakkasan today. The subject? Sherry and Port. It was a fun session, and we finished with the 1985 Taylor, a Port that’s now peaking, showing lovely complex, mature flavours, as well as retaining some fruit and tannin. Lovely stuff. In preparation I came across this nice picture of Porto, [...] |
 This is the blog of wine journalist Jamie Goode, online since 2001. Feel free to nose around; your comments are welcomed.
 
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