For The Love Of Port

Guys, Im in possesion of a couple of 1970 VPs in excellent condition. The ones I have are:
Grahams, Andresen, Niepoort, Croft and Fonseca.

I do plan to open them up on one night to compare them against each other. Does anyone have experience with decanting times and with the sequence of tasting.

Thanks in advance :)
Axel

In a moment of boredom I have made you a present, in flamboyant and plain versions. Send me the names of your guests and I’ll name each of their pages.

Axel,

Julian performed the same generous task for me when I organised the recent UK tasting. The product proved very useful, especially as the night wore on and memory of what was in each glass became hazy to say the least.

I would like to nominate Julian as the official FTLOP Offline Accessory Supplier 8)

Derek

The software is written: the additional cost of another placemat is merely a few minutes work. And it is rather good at avoiding certain types of drunken confusion.

— Secretary to the Official FTLOP Offline Accessory Supplier

Edit: Derek, since sending you some PS files a few weeks ago the software has had a few improvements. If making your own placemat do start by taking a copy of the latest version of the code from the usual place.

Julian,

I will grab the most recent version the next time I need it. Hopefully by then I will have thought of a good reason to ask the desktop support team to give me an Acrobat Distiller upgrade to eliminate the problems I had last time 8)

Derek

Julian,

I have to commend you on that! That is awesome!! If I am ever so fortunate to be holding a tasting of VPs where I have more guests than me, myself, and I AND I happen to have more than one bottle of VP at a time, I will definitely shoot you a message.

I looked at your sourcepage there - is it just Mac that you can produce these placemats with?

Todd

A text editor and something to convert PostScript to PDF. The difficult bit was writing the PostScript program, but that’s done, so making placemats for specific tastings now takes a mere moment.

We have rather drifted away from the original question about decanting times for 1970s ports of varying reputations.

For decanting time, I would advise more rather than less.

If you decanted first thing in the morning prior to an evening session, then all be well, but the wines might show a little better if you decanted the day before, and they certainly won't be deteriorating after that time.

- So decanting the day before is favourite.

Don't forget to remove the capsules, clean off the top of the bottles and then stand them upright (in a cool place) a couple of days beforehand.

Tom

Decanting times. In my experience, well stored bottles of 1970 Grahams and Fonseca can easily take 6-8 hours of decanting time. I would guess Niepoort is in that bracket, with the others like croft needing slightly less.