times you finish up a meal or end up your night with

a snifter of this noble wine, the pleasure never palls.

 

It’s a testament to Port’s popularity that it has never suffered the same fate as Sherry and faded into the background. Port has been a staple in the Kiwi drinking diet for generations and is likely to remain so.

Port’s popularity can be put down to a simple reason – it’s a really lovely wine to drink.

Made from a blend of up to 100 different grape varieties, the wine’s fermentation is stopped by the addition of grape spirit. This leaves more residual sugar in the wine than there would be had fermentation gone all the way.

The spirit boosts the alcohol content, so the wine is sweet, but strong. It is then aged in stainless steel or oak barrels for varying times, depending on what style is required.

The main styles are: white, pink, ruby, tawny, late-bottled vintage and vintage.

White is made from white grapes and tends to be a fairly basic wine, but its richness does lend itself to making excellent cocktails.

Ruby is – again – a young wine, with a fairly simple profile – sweet, dark and relatively uncomplicated. Pink port is a newcomer, a rose style designed to be drunk much like any rose wine, but with a richer flavour profile.

Tawny port is port aged in barrels, from which it takes its characteristic colour.

A solera system is used to allow gradual oxidation of the wine, which gives a subtle, nutty character to the wine.

When no age is indicated on a tawny, it is a basic blend of wood-aged Port that has spent at least two years in barrels. Beyond that come tawnys with the average years “in wood” stated on the label. The official categories are 10, 20, 30 and over 40 years.

The categories indicate a target age profile for the ports, not their actual ages, though many people mistakenly believe that the categories indicate the minimum average ages of the blends.

A more recent development has been the release of colheita tawnys, which are wines from a single vintage.

Then there are the LBVs, or late-bottled vintages. This started out as wine that had been destined for bottling as vintage port, but because of lack of demand was left in the barrel for longer than had been planned. 

Over the years, it has developed into two distinct styles of wine, both of them bottled between four and six years after the vintage, but one style is fined and filtered before bottling, while the other is not.

The filtered wine has the advantage of being ready to drink without having to be decanted and is bottled in a stoppered bottle that can be easily resealed. This is designed to exploit the extended shelf life such wines enjoy by comparison with vintage port, once opened. However, convenience comes at a price and filtration strips out much of the character of the wine.

The top of the tree for Port, however, is vintage.

This is wine from a single year that is deemed good enough for the Port houses to “declare” a vintage. Not all or even most of the houses will declare each year a vintage. In fact, the decision to do so doesn’t happen until the spring of the second year following the vintage. It’s not a lightly taken decision either. The reputation of the Port house depends on the quality and consistency of its declarations.

Vintage Port is bottled after a maximum of two and a half years in the barrel, meaning most of its development (10-30 years or more) will happen in the bottle.

These extraordinary wines are rich and dark when younger, smoothing out to a velvety sweetness in old age. Incredibly complex and rich, they are the pinnacle of the art of Port.

Of course, all the above is about Portuguese Port, as opposed to the various “ports” that exist in other parts of the world.

Australian port is the most familiar here, being generally a brown, raisin-flavoured wine

with a persistent stickiness and a cloying finish. There are no genuine vintage ports from Australia, but the standard tawnys offer a fun experience.

We only had Portuguese Port for this month’s Panel tasting and it was interesting to see what some of the less well-known houses would be like.

For this month’s tasting, I was joined by regular Panellist Dave Batten, whose love affair with Port stretches back many years.