For The Love Of Port

From a thread currently in PORT BASICS, I thought about starting a seperate thread ...

When choosing a Colheita, I assume most people select a bottle based on the producer and price, with the vintage being the 3rd most important dynamic when making a buying decision. At least that is how it works for me. How about you?

More importantly and the reason for this thread:

a. When buying a Colheita, does the specific VINTAGE of the bottling really matter to you? If so, why?

b. Do you think it is important that the vintage of a Colheita be from a declared Port vintage?

In my limited experiance I look for price over vintage and I've found no real difference from a declared year to a non declared one.I'm starting to take a more closer look at the producers.Anyway I'm away for a week and have took a Kopke 1977 colheita with me bottled in 85.

I find Colheitas difficult to assess for value. There are too many potential permutations, leading to very patchy reviews. Indeed I suspect many commentators steer clear of them, simply because they don't know where to begin!

Although others disagree, this is my main reason for wanting a tighter IVDP specification for these wines, with the bottling date restricted to a set of specified numbers of years following the vintage.

That way, some meaningful comparisons could be made.

Auction and merchant prices are all over the place, most recently some Barao de Vilar '94 sold for £90/half case, which was higher than I expected.

The only Colheitas in my cellar are some excellent Niepoorts from '78 and '83, which I acquired a couple of years ago for little more than £5/bottle!

Tom

I think you've got it right there, Roy. I tend to look at Producer, then Price, then Vintage in that order too. The problem here in the states is the lack of choices anymore on colheitas being offered. Here in the midwest I have seen a run of Royal Oporto offerings on colheita, at astronomical prices. If I was to be in the northwest, I would find the Porto Rocha offerings. But that's about it. I'm sure there are some Niepoorts around but I have not seen many. I saw a Niepoort 20 yr Tawny recently for $60 that peaked my interest.

But to answer your question, I think questions a. and b. for me are inexorably linked in that "vintage" does play a role in my decision - I certainly look for a colheita from a good vintage - that being one that has been declared. I mean, after all, the declared vintages are ones in which the producer has tasted the port in barrel and said it is really good. Well, the colheita is going to come from those barrels. So it a good guideline for me.

I've been going through the range of Rocha and Kopke Colheitas (pretty much all we can find up here in Seattle) from the early 70's on up (as well as a few older), and I haven’t found any correlation between a declared VP year and an excellent bottle of Colheita. Heck, I actually haven’t found much consistency between these two producers within the same year. One of my favorite Kopke years, was pretty much a sad offering from Rocha.

So when picking a Colheita, if it’s an unknown year / producer, I'll go price first, then producer, then year. If it’s a known one (to me) I'll pick by year then producer and then price.

For me, vintages are certainly less important with colheitas. One of my favorites at the moment is the Noval 1974 (the '76 is excellent as well). I tend to look at producer, bottling date, price, vintage. In that order.