For The Love Of Port

This is good stuff. Or it was, in my mind’s eye. Six or seven years ago, when I had begun to determine that proper port was not to be confused with the slop that I had been served during my soldiering days with which to toast Her Majesty, Fallen Comrades and the Regiment after officers’ mess dinners, Maynard’s 20-year-old tawny could be had for a song at the down-market Aldi supermarket chain – an outlet of which was situated near to my home in Brussels. As such, when I saw a single bottle recently on the secondary market, nostalgia demanded that I acquire it.

The appearance of the tawny was as I remembered: quite brown and largely opaque, though perfectly pleasing to the eye. I now know, or at least suspect, that the dark hues in this port reflected the producer’s practice of acquiring tawnies aged upriver by smaller growers. The nose was not terribly expressive, though light notes of moss, oak, walnut, caramel and mulberry could all be discerned. Poached pear and the thinnest of caramels were evident on entry, with a sensation akin to that occasioned by a wee nip of bitters taking over from there. The finish was short, though neither nasty nor brutish. On the dry side, this wine was losing its balance insofar as the acidity in this 2013 bottling was failing to keep pace with the residual sugar. In this respect and on the whole, the contents of this bottle reminded me of the garrafeiras particulares of which I am now fond of acquiring from small Douro growers when opportunity presents itself, insofar as these are invariably a positive experience - though highly unpredictable when permitted to stray for long from the barrels in which they have been nurtured.

-89 points

The slop sentence made me laugh.

I thought that I would give a 2013 bottling of this same tawny a try when the opportunity presented itself recently for the princely sum of EUR 20. What could go wrong? Happily, nothing much.

In the glass on 13 February 2021, the wine looked much as had the previous exemplar: amber hues crowned by a yellowing rim let plenty of light through the tawny, not least as it was untroubled by cloud. The nose was more expressive this time around, its dominant features being caramel, a gentle zest, something akin to rust and an herbal dash which was redolent of thyme. The fore-palate did not discern much of anything save half-caramelised sugar, with lemon zest and grape stem appearing at the midway point, giving way to a rather bitter sensation at the back-palate. The finish proved to be perfectly satisfying: at the start, it warmed (rather than burned) the roof of the mouth, whereas this pleasantry was washed away by a gentle rush cinnamon. Overall, this bottle was better balanced than the last, having had the decency to retain sufficient acidity to handle the residual sugars.

Contemplating the two bottles - with no sense of how either had been stored since 2013 - made for a mildly interesting exercise, if only because is nothing much to do nowadays other than to kick the cat and thrash the children. At any rate, whereas the bottles diverged slightly in certain respects, the differences proved to be quite modest.

As before:

-89 points

If it were a recent bottling, Maynards warrants higher than 89 points. If one thing is true on Maynard tawny's; they taste much older than they rate the age. Their 30 year might as well say 100 year, lol... They are quite generous in their ratings for 10-20-30 year tawny and done in a drier style as you mentioned.

Moses Botbol wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 8:13 am If it were a recent bottling, Maynards warrants higher than 89 points.

I concur fully Moses: when I lived in Brussels a few years back, I drank piles of Maynard's, which I recall being very good and certainly inexpensive relative to its peers. However, at that point I was relatively new to port, such that I had not yet learned how to prepare tasting notes, score and the like.