For The Love Of Port

To ALL FTLOP'ers,


May your Christmas Eve dinner through your Christmas Day celebrations with friends and loved ones be filled with warmth, laughs and fine bottles of Port wine!


All the best to you from the staff at FTLOP!


Andy, David, Fernando, Glenn, Mario, Stewart and Roy




If you'd like to share which bottles of Port you are planning to enjoy during your celebrations ... we'd love to live vicariously through reading your selections here.

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all!


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Merry xmas!

i woke up yesterday with a cold and can barely taste or smell anything, so i think i'll have some box wine or maybe cocoa with a cordial rather than any Port.

does anyone have any offbeat holiday traditions? in high school i accidentally ended up watching a weird movie every xmas eve, so i decided to make it a tradition. some examples have been The Wall, Four Rooms, Black Swan, and last year was Krampus. this year i didn't, but i watched The Princess Bride which is my favorite movie.

Happy holidays

Thanks to all on FTLOP for sharing knowledge and your time. Also thanks to the team keeping everything running behind the scenes. Much love.

As for port shared with family and friends over last and the upcoming week. This has been my setup

2011 Churchill's LBV
1980 Gould Campbell
2000 Niepoort Colheita
1982 Dalva Colheita
40 Anos S. Leonardo Tawny

I will serve any leftovers on New Years Eve, but that is more a night for champagne and drinks

Scheiny S wrote:Merry xmas!

i woke up yesterday with a cold and can barely taste or smell anything, so i think i'll have some box wine or maybe cocoa with a cordial rather than any Port.

does anyone have any offbeat holiday traditions? in high school i accidentally ended up watching a weird movie every xmas eve, so i decided to make it a tradition. some examples have been The Wall, Four Rooms, Black Swan, and last year was Krampus. this year i didn't, but i watched The Princess Bride which is my favorite movie.

Always watch Christmas Vacation, love that movie.


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Merry Christmas Everyone!

Had a white one in Northeast Penna...cold too.

For Christmas Eve Eve dinner (a new extended family tradition since we get so scattered, no conflicts two days before) I brought a 2012 Niepoort LBV...OK, but it felt disappointing for Niepoort (and the little left over 2 days later had gone downhill fast).

Christmas Eve no Port but opened a bottle of 2009 Lavendira I got from Ayesha---it was awesome...so good opened another on Christmas.

Christmas Day: San Leonardo 40 Year....what a spectacular wine. Everyone enjoyed it a lot.

I always want to watch It's a Wonderful Life during the season.

The 2009 Levandera is a wine I made sure she bought all of what was left from the winery. She did. I told her she could sell it at any time in the next five years and it would drink well far longer than that. She bought 30 cases or so. She was only selling her top clientele, (restaurant trade) who are used to buying the most current vintage. I explained that 2009 was a very good year for Douro wines and this producer (DR) did a spectacular job with this wine. I've not had it in a couple of years, before she bought it, but I have consumed four bottles and each was crazy good. Whatever is left of this, is in her hands nowadays.

As for movies, my wife and I watched her favorite: It's a Wonderful Life. She fell asleep afterwards and I watched the second Trainspotting. Loved it, but you had to see the first one to have any clue what the heck was going on. Not easy to understand ... due to the language.

Roy

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! I opened a 1985 Fonseca VP and a Quinta do Mourao "60" Very Old White Port on Christmas day. Both were outstanding and everyone loved them. My family is getting spoiled!

Have a Happy New Year!

The highlight of my Christmas drinking was sharing a bottle of Taylor 1970 which a friend brought over from Ireland. We met in the Cotswolds on the one snowy day we had over Christmas in the south of England. Around 4 inches of snow, clear skies and a full and very bright moon. The temperatures were around the low thirties or high twenties so the snow stayed around for about 24 hours before the temperatures rose again. It was a beautiful sight. We walked to and from the pub where we had dinner, sat in front of a big log fire and enjoyed a rich, hot game stew.

When we got back to the cottage where we were staying out came the decanter of port, which went down slowly over the next 3-4 hours. This was easily the best bottle of Taylor 1970 I have ever had. The story goes that in early 1972 a wealthy family in Ireland approached a local wine merchant to ask what port would he recommend they buy to lay down and drink over the next 30-40 years. He recommended Taylor 1970 expecting an order of a case or two, perhaps more. When the order came in to his office it was for four. That's four ... pipes. And the family wanted them delivered in the wood to their country house.

The merchant arranged for the pipes to be shipped and delivered. Sadly one was broken when being unloaded at the docks (imagine - 650 bottles streaming from a barrel into the Irish Sea) but was replaced a few weeks later. In early 1973 there were four intact, whole pipes of Taylor 1970 vintage port. The family got together and bought two corking machines, several thousand bottles and were supplied with branded corks. Over a long weekend, ever member of the family and their household staff were involved in sterilising bottles and corks, decanting port from the pipes into the bottles, corking the bottles, waxing the bottles and binning the bottles. Just under 3,000 bottles were filled and put to rest in the family cellars. My friend came got to know the family relatively recently and, when they found his love of port, had the good fortune to share a bottle with one of the family members. He was taken by the quality of the port and managed to acquire a dozen or so from the family - one of which he shared with me a few days ago. It was magnificent. Port is an incredibly robust wine to have been bottled by enthusiastic amateurs and yet to be absolutely stellar in quality. I am very lucky and very grateful for the opportunity to have heard the story and to have shared the port.

Happy Christmas all!

That's some Christmas cheer!