The owner of Portal is in Seattle with his US importer. Will be seeing them both in the city, at dinner tonight. It has been too long since Pedro was in Seattle. I hope they'll be boosting sales of Portal as we need more Port diversity in this area ... and Douro wines too!
They do have a few SKUs at Costco, but hopefully beyond that, some greater market penetration would be excellent for all concerned.
I've had their 2008 LBV and was quite impressed and their 10 year old tawny was good (both 2x)....but nothing beyond that. Aside from their basic rubies/tawnies the only other thing available to me locally is a 20 year old tawny. So far I am liking this producer and the scores in the TN database are promising, so please get us more!
Portal has no market share in MA and they should. Not sure if their dry wines are even being sold in MA. I could've sworn their distributor stopped carrying them here. I use to buy their port all the time when I was in OKC.
Roy Hersh wrote:Our dinner meeting turned out wonderfully. Lots of ideas in both directions
I recommended a well-situated tasting room in Gaia and a shuttle van from the Pinhao train station to their Sabrosa property in the Douro. We'll see.
A shuttle would be super good idea. It's a great place to visit, but that's a long taxi ride which most people probably wouldn't do. Making it easy with a regular shuttle bus, or scheduled ahead of time, would be wonderful.
There has been some real price drop on Portal in Denmark, if it was just that one importer dumping prices by 50% or a agressive move from Portal itself, I do not know.
Andy Velebil wrote:A shuttle would be super good idea. It's a great place to visit, but that's a long taxi ride which most people probably wouldn't do. Making it easy with a regular shuttle bus, or scheduled ahead of time, would be wonderful.
That would increase traffic and guests to Portal significantly.
I noticed the crazy low prices and pallets of cases of Portal while over there in Oct. 2014. I was amazed at the hundreds of cases on sales from various vintages and if I had any easy way to bring them back to the USA, would have loaded up with as much as I could've moved.
John M.,
Yes, that is likely. I am even considering doing another Buying Op with them at some point, if there was enough interest!?!?
I noticed the crazy low prices and pallets of cases of Portal while over there in Oct. 2014. I was amazed at the hundreds of cases on sales from various vintages and if I had any easy way to bring them back to the USA, would have loaded up with as much as I could've moved.
John M.,
Yes, that is likely. I am even considering doing another Buying Op with them at some point, if there was enough interest!?!?