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Transcendental Terrantez Tasting

Epic Tasting of Ancient Madeiras

Tenets of Tawny Port

Everything you ever wanted to know about Tawny

Decanting Vintage Port

Everything you ever wanted to know about Tawny

Top 12 Vintage Ports

Want to know what 12 Ports you should have in your cellar? Roy picks 'em!

Roys Blog

How to Defeat Corkiness of Cockburn’s 1983 VP

There’s no denying that when bottles of 1983 Cockburn’s present clean and at their best, this Vintage Port may just be the top of the class from that now 30 year old vintage. Nevertheless, there’s no other Vintage Port that has globally shown such a high incidence of TCA.

Having personally opened a few dozen bottles of this particular Port, including one just a few weeks ago … from empirical evidence, more than 50% of the ’83 Cockburn’s I’ve encountered in the past 20 years have been corked. Miguel Corte-Real, the former winemaker of Cockburn’s who made this wine, admitted that that there was a “significant problem” with this particular vintage and he explained that there was considerable issues with the quality of corks used during the bott...

Quevedo

Let’s start off with a little bit of historical perspective to gain a better understanding of how this family got started in the Port business. From the words of Oscar Quevedo Sr., “My great grandfather António Abel da Costa, from my mother's side, started producing wine between 1850-1860 in Valongo dos Azeites. There, we had vineyards and warehouses, as well as granite lagares, which allowed us to make over 100 pipas yearly, almost all Port Wine. When António Abel da Costa died, his son Raúl Gouveia Costa, born in 1889, succeeded him, and some years later, started labeling his own wine called, Quinta de Santo António. Under Raul's management, the property lived a long period of expansion, though there were two major periods of fin...