For The Love Of Port

I was reading the Guest Corner article by David Sweet in Roy's last newsletter, in which he compared two bottles of Ferreira's 20 year old tawny that were bottled 16 years apart.

It occurred to me that you can also find some colheitas that are the "same" colheita but are bottled many years apart.

Does anyone know whether colheita wines are identical when bottled years apart, or does the blender make a different choice from the barrels available each time a bottling run takes place? In other words, the proportions of the barrels used for the bottling run in 1990 of the 1937 Colheita may be very different from the proportions of the barrels used for the 1937 Colheita bottled in 2006. Although both could rightly be called 1937 Colheita, they could taste very different indeed.

I would have thought that the logistics would have meant it was virtually impossible to produce identical wines for each bottling.

Alex

Alex,

A friend (Fernando) who is the winemaker at Kopke had this to say of the process of racking of the colheitas to open vats once or twice a year for inspection. He noted that if different barrels of the same year were tasting differently from alternate storage locations, etc. and if there could be an overall improvement from mixing these same year barrels to provide consistency, then they would do so. But this only partially answers the question so here is more, directly:

As we do with all colheitas the wine for bottling is duly ready, and we take special care to fill just the necessary bottles to satisfy any demand.

A bottled of colheita 1937 that has been filled in 1990 is always a colheita 1937 and the difference that we find is a lighter colour and flavours get for the time that the wine was in the bottled.

This can not be a great difference from a colheita 1937 bottling in 2006, but they still exist, because of the process of evolution , one is a oxidation process and the other is a reduction process.

I especially notice this sentence:

"This can not be a great difference from a colheita 1937 bottling in 2006, but they still exist, because of the process of evolution , one is a oxidation process and the other is a reduction process."

He's basically saying, that the colheita 1937 did NOT improve (or even change) significantly from 16 years in cask!!! This may be the case - but why then, bother buying very old colheitas bottled recently, as their quality will have improved (or changed?) insignificantly as the years have gone by. This means it's much smarter to buy a 10 year old colheita TODAY and keep it for a number of years, as the result is basically the same in 50 or 100 years!

Am I reading this wrong?

Nikolaj Winther wrote: Am I reading this wrong?

I think you are reading this wrong, Nikolaj.

My reading of this sentence is that there may be differences in the blend from one bottling to another but that these differences would be very small. The second part of the sentence seems to deal with a different subject, being a comparison of 2 bottlings of the same wine on the same day with the difference between them being attributed to bottle ageing versus cask ageing.

I think logic dictates that the answer to Al-B's original question must be yes. The only way it could be no is where an entire vintage was contained in one cask and never blended with wine from another cask. This may be true for small producers but the big boys who churn out loads of old juice must have many casks from which to blend the quantity that will be bottled in any given year. Even if the same amounts are taken from the same casks each year those casks will evolve at slightly different rates over extended periods of time therefore the blend can never be identical.

Derek