What have you opened this week?

[Mike J. W.]

Small tasting at the "office" club.

10YO Vieira de Sousa White
1998 Andresen Colheita
2015 Quinta do Crasto LBV

The Andresen knocked it out the park. Excellent start to the weekend.

I like their Colheitas alot.

[Al B.]

We had a White Port tasting last week. My contributions were bottles of Poças 10YO White and Quinta do Manoella 10YO White.

The Poças was fine. The Manoella was superb.

[Eric Menchen]

1992 Quevedo Colheita - Tasty, but initially tasted more like a 10-20 year old tawny. It improved with air time.
1997 Quinta do Vesuvio - I have a good number of these and decided it was time to give one a try. Opening a foot locker I found this leaker on top, so even more reason to open. It showed no apparent degradation from the leakage.

vesuvio_sml.jpg (90.35 KiB) Viewed 3344 times

[Eric Ifune]

1974 Quevedo Colheita.

[Al B.]

We had a 1997 Horizontal tasting in the UK this week. My contributions were bottled of Martínez 1997 and Quinta de Val da Figueira 1997.

[Thomas V]

We had a 1997 Horizontal tasting in the UK this week. My contributions were bottled of Martínez 1997 and Quinta de Val da Figueira 1997.

Your takeaways as in which are performing well at the minute and which are going to stand the test of time?

It is a vintage I personally adore. Have a soft spot for the Vesuvio (duh!), Warre's, Dow's and Fonseca.

[Al B.]

We had a 1997 Horizontal tasting in the UK this week. My contributions were bottled of Martínez 1997 and Quinta de Val da Figueira 1997.

Your takeaways as in which are performing well at the minute and which are going to stand the test of time?

It is a vintage I personally adore. Have a soft spot for the Vesuvio (duh!), Warre's, Dow's and Fonseca.

You can find an overall summary here together with links to the tasting notes of the wines we had.

[Al B.]

Just opened a non-TCA tainted bottle of Dow 1977 to celebrate the weekend. It’s delicious!

[Mike J. W.]

1985 Niepoort VP. The bottle was a little rough, but I was hoping it would improve with a day of air time. It didn't TCA.

So today I opened an '85 Fonseca. It's singing.

[Glenn E.]

2008 DR White Colheita. Love this Port!

[Thomas V]

My mission to port-convert my neighbour has completed. Yesterday without my doing he brought over a 30 Anos White from Quinta da Devesa to share and I returned the favour by opening a 1991 Andresen colheita. End of session we are both just smiling.

Both wines very on point and shows what Portuguese style ports are all about.

[Andy Velebil]

My mission to port-convert my neighbour has completed. Yesterday without my doing he brought over a 30 Anos White from Quinta da Devesa to share and I returned the favour by opening a 1991 Andresen colheita. End of session we are both just smiling.

Both wines very on point and shows what Portuguese style ports are all about.

Well done!

[Mike J. W.]

1960 Hooper's Vintage Port

This turned out to be surprisingly decent after 24 hours. The first bottle I had of this 3 years ago was BAD. One more bottle left, hopefully that's good like this one was.

[Glenn E.]

1985 Graham
1987 Taylor Vargellas
1991 Taylor Vargellas
1994 Vesuvio

These were bookended by a 1985 Fonseca and a 1997 Quinta do Noval which made for a pretty excellent "best of the 80s and 90s" tasting.

Then for dessert we had a Quinta do Mourao "60" to go along with my bottle of DR L70.

It was a good night.

[Mike J. W.]

1985 Graham
1987 Taylor Vargellas
1991 Taylor Vargellas
1994 Vesuvio

These were bookended by a 1985 Fonseca and a 1997 Quinta do Noval which made for a pretty excellent "best of the 80s and 90s" tasting.

Then for dessert we had a Quinta do Mourao "60" to go along with my bottle of DR L70.

It was a good night.

Someone was thirsty! It sounds like a great night. Not a bad one in the batch in that lineup. Which one stood out?

[Glenn E.]

1985 Graham
1987 Taylor Vargellas
1991 Taylor Vargellas
1994 Vesuvio

These were bookended by a 1985 Fonseca and a 1997 Quinta do Noval which made for a pretty excellent "best of the 80s and 90s" tasting.

Then for dessert we had a Quinta do Mourao "60" to go along with my bottle of DR L70.

It was a good night.

Someone was thirsty! It sounds like a great night. Not a bad one in the batch in that lineup. Which one stood out?

My VP of the night was the Vesuvio, but it was a really close race between it and the 1987 Vargellas. I had them both at 96 points with the nod to the Vesuvio.

But none of the VPs could keep up with those 2 tawnies. This time around I slightly preferred the L70, but others preferred the "60". I had them at 99 and 98 points! (For those who care about such things, this was one of the circa 2015 FTLOP buying op 750ml bottles of the "60" with the 40YO labels and a hang tag that says "60". Some also had a round sticker on the label that said "60" but this one didn't. This was bottle #31/200 of the L70, which means it was bottled in 2017.)

The 1997 Noval was flawed, at least in my opinion. There's an unfortunate problem with a lot of these that gives them both a nose and a palate of sneaker rubber and/or tar/asphalt. This one wasn't nearly as bad as some others that I've had, but it was definitely there. When clean this is an astonishingly good Port, but unfortunately the rate of problems is as bad in my experience as the infamous 1983 Cockburn's rate of TCA infection.

[Eric Ifune]

Ferreira Dona Antonio 20 year old.

[Mike J. W.]

Ferreira Dona Antonio 20 year old.

How do you find the new version in relation to the older version (Duque de Braganca)?

[Eric Ifune]

This was a very early bottling. They still had the old Duque de Braganca on the shelves when I got it.
I thought it very good. Unlike some of the recent tasting notes I've seen.

[Mike J. W.]

1979 Kopke Colheita, bottled 2019.