Taylor's Vintage Port Labeling Questions

[Eric LaMasters]

Hi everyone. This is my first post.
First a bit of background. I am the program chair for our local wine tasting group for this year, and I have included a Taylor Vintage Port vertical tasting in our program this year. Port is not a category I drink very often, but I wanted to include this tasting for my own education to get to see the aging curve of vintage port over a long period. I decided on the Taylor 2000, 1992, 1977, 1970, 1963, and 1948 (two bottles of each) for this tasting in order to give a broad view from young to old. I sourced all of the bottles from reputable retailers in order to reduce the odds of fakes or improperly stored bottles, but I realize that anything is still possible.
Here is where my questions begin. I am very confident with appearance of the bottles from 2000, 1992, and 1977. Where I get confused is with the labeling of the older bottles. The 1970, 1963, and 1948 look so different from the others. The two 1970s bear the same label, but it is different from all the others. The two 1963s and the two 1948s appear to be bottled by different bottlers. The capsules on the 1963s indicate Corney & Barrow and Averys Bristol, and the 1948s indicate Grants of St James and I'm not sure of the other one. I know I will get questions about the different labels from our tasting group, and I want to be prepared with reasonable answers.
So, first of all, should I be particularly concerned about the authenticity of any of these, just based upon the labels? Secondly, is there a primer I can find somewhere about the different bottlers of the older Port wines? Also, approximately what year did Taylor's switch to 100% estate bottling?
Thanks in advance for the information!
Here are the pictures: (I can add more detailed pictures if that would help)
2000, 1992, and 1977
1963
1970 and 1948

[Bradley Bogdan]

The short answer is no, not at first cursory glance to me. I'll let other who have had older Taylor's bottlings far more often than myself chime in and correct me if I'm wrong, but those all appear to be label styles I've seen before.

Up until the 1970s, most Port was bottled outside of Portugal, and then labeled by whoever put it in bottle. That means that Grants of St. James, Averys, Corney & Barrow, Berry Brothers & Rudd or whomever else bought a barrel or ten could put whatever they wanted on there for a label. In rarer cases, outfits such as Averys might blend a barrel of Taylor's with a barrel of brand B and C and bottle it simply as Avery's 19XX Port. So, yes, you're going to see a ton of label variation before 1975.

In either '72 or '73, the rule change came into effect that shippers HAD to bottle in Portugal and couldn't ship by cask to London or other places for buyers to bottle themselves. That didn't solve all the differences in labeling, as different importers and distributors would still sometimes vary on labels, sometimes even within the same country, but on the whole, labels are MUCH more consistent from '75 onward.

Looking at google image results, Taylor may have actually started estate bottling with the '70 vintage, as I can't find any images of labels indicating other bottlers. Perhaps someone else can give you a more definite answer. There definitely was a trend towards having more brand control and ensuring someone wasn't cutting your product with something cheaper when it reached its destination before the actual rule change, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn Taylor was ahead of the game.

I don't know of any primer on bottlers other than the many tasting notes here and at another, British based Port site. I know the most experienced folks here, and especially on the British site, have opinions on the quality of the major bottlers of the time, as much of the remaining pre-'70 Port is British bottled, such as yours.

As for authenticity, nothing other than the fresh color of the right hand '63 and '48 would give me any question. One would then look at other label details like typeset, bottle construction, glass style, capsule/wax, cork branding (i.e. Name and year on the cork) to see if anything else raised red flags. Obviously though, all of those things just give one a guess as to the provenance of the wine (unless it was a very poorly done fake). A lot of human error and odd things were done before the era of automated bottling and labeling. The surest way to have confidence in what you buy is doing your homework on the provenance, and when you can't trace it back, using sellers you trust to look out for those details for you, as it sounds like you did.

Those are some amazing Ports you have lined up. I hope they all show their best and knock the socks off your club! Let us know how it goes!


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[Glenn E.]

Hi Eric, welcome to FTLOP!



Good news - at least at first glance, those are all perfectly normal looking bottles and labels.

Port was often shipped in bulk and the bottled by the recipient. Which means that each merchant used whatever bottles they had on hand, and often produced their own labels as well. Avery's, Corney & Barrow, and Grants of St. James's Street are all well-known English bottlers. They are, in fact, some of the more reliable names that you might find on older bottles of Vintage Port.

Questions like yours are fairly common - in fact I made this thread in November just to show some examples of perfectly normal variation in bottling and labeling.

You've set up a pretty fabulous tasting of Taylor's Vintage Port for your group - enjoy!

[Eric LaMasters]

Thanks for the detailed response. I really appreciate it!

[Phil W]

Hi Eric,

Bradley has covered most aspects of the answer to your questions regarding port-bottling pre-1972 (everywhere, especially UK) and post-1972 (only in Porto) hence the larger variation in pre-1972 labels from multiple bottlers.

Regarding the labels, searching the VPID for all Taylor labels show many which match those you have posted. Specifically:
Image1: '77,'92,'2000 all look correct,
Image2: The Corney '63 looks genuine from the tiny bit of capsule I can see; I have not seen that label on a Taylor '63 before, but the style is consistent with other bottlings. The other '63 looks to me like a replacement label.
Image3: 70 and '48 from Grant's look correct; the other '48 looks like a replacement label.

So, I would have good confidence in '77, '92, '2000, '63(1), '70, '48(1).
I would have less confidence in '63(2) and '48(2), though equally no particular reason to be suspicious; examination of the capsules (and comparison to VPID capsule images of Taylor) might raise the confidence in those two bottles also.

Welcome to the forum, and I hope you have a very successful tasting.

[Moses Botbol]

That is some tasting and pretty good club you have going. Two '48 Taylor's is no easy or inexpensive task. You should be fine with the whole line up

[Eric LaMasters]

Questions like yours are fairly common - in fact I made this thread in November just to show some examples of perfectly normal variation in bottling and labeling.

Thanks for the link, Glenn. I really enjoyed reading through the information there.

[Eric LaMasters]

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies.

For our wine tastings with dry red wines, my standard practice is to double decant at home so the sediment does not get stirred up on the way to the restaurant (and to save time when pouring at the restaurant). Should this work okay for Port as well?

Do the following decant times look reasonable?
1948 - 1-2 hours
1963 - 3 hours
1970 - 4 hours
1977 - 4 hours
1992 - 6 hours
2000 - 6-8 hours

Should I shoot for a serving temp in the low 60s Fahrenheit, like I would with a dry red?

[Moses Botbol]

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies.

For our wine tastings with dry red wines, my standard practice is to double decant at home so the sediment does not get stirred up on the way to the restaurant (and to save time when pouring at the restaurant). Should this work okay for Port as well?

Do the following decant times look reasonable?
1948 - 1-2 hours
1963 - 3 hours
1970 - 4 hours
1977 - 4 hours
1992 - 6 hours
2000 - 6-8 hours

Should I shoot for a serving temp in the low 60s Fahrenheit, like I would with a dry red?

Decant times are hard to say because as they get older, the times can vary. I generally just open the older first and then break it up in two sessions; just old and then new. I would hate to see you drink down that '48 just after two hours and miss out. 1963 I let decant more like 6 hours for instance.

Also, I try to keep decanting down to the bare minimum. Too much and you're striping out flavor. I would do one decant through coarse cheese cloth or muslin, rinse out the port bottle in water and pour port back in. Do not go through cloth twice.

[Eric LaMasters]

We held the tasting last night and it went very well. One of our bottles of the 48 was corked, but the other one was stunning, my favorite of the evening. The 63 seemed to show more of its spirit than the others, and felt a bit too heavy on alcohol. The 70 and 77 were lovely and were very similar to each other. The 92 was one of my favorites, still opaquely dark and very young with lots fruit. The 2000 was also really good but a bit closed now compared with the 92. I also threw in a Taylor "1964 Very Old Single Harvest" Colheita as a ringer (though it didn't fool anyone.) It was extraordinarily complex and I really liked it. It's amazing how different the character is between aging in bottle vs. barrel.
It was a really fun evening and it was great to see a snapshot of the aging profile of Taylor vintage port over several decades. I felt like I learned a lot from the tasting.

[Andy Velebil]

We held the tasting last night and it went very well. One of our bottles of the 48 was corked, but the other one was stunning, my favorite of the evening. The 63 seemed to show more of its spirit than the others, and felt a bit too heavy on alcohol. The 70 and 77 were lovely and were very similar to each other. The 92 was one of my favorites, still opaquely dark and very young with lots fruit. The 2000 was also really good but a bit closed now compared with the 92. I also threw in a Taylor "1964 Very Old Single Harvest" Colheita as a ringer (though it didn't fool anyone.) It was extraordinarily complex and I really liked it. It's amazing how different the character is between aging in bottle vs. barrel.
It was a really fun evening and it was great to see a snapshot of the aging profile of Taylor vintage port over several decades. I felt like I learned a lot from the tasting.

What a fun tasting and thanks for the recap. Total bummer on the corked bottle, but I like the "ringer". It's always fun to show people how bottle vs barrel aging yields such a different Port.

[Bradley Bogdan]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and recap! Sounds like most of the wines showed well and a good time was had, which is as much as you can ever really hope for.


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