1937 Porto Rocha Colheita

[Glenn E.]

1937 Porto Rocha Colheita (b. 2007)

Opened for the March meeting of the Sammamish Port Club. Decanted for 5 hours which was just about right. It was still improving slightly, though, so maybe 6 would have been better. I've owned this bottle since 2009 or 2010 and it's been sleeping peacefully in one of my wine fridges, so I was very careful when retrieving it to avoid stirring up the super fine sediment that is so common in old Porto Rocha Colheitas. Managed to keep it clean while decanting, too.

Color: medium dark tawny with some distinct brown notes. Greening around the edges, but not as much as you might expect from a 70-years-in-wood Colheita. Perfectly clear which is unusual for old Porto Rochas.

Nose: precise and firm but with a dusty note. There's a darkness to it like old wood or old leather. But also plenty of caramel or toffee notes.

Palate: dark and intense, with a hardness to it. Caramel that was right on the edge of being too dark (i.e. burned). Smooth entry and mouth-filling flavor, but then another sharpness that also resembled something that was almost burned. No one mentioned that it seemed like a Port that had been in bottle too long, though stylistically it seemed to have sharper edges than might be normal even for this Port. Even after the reveal no one thought that it had suffered from bottle age, though it did lose out on Port of the Night to a 2011 bottling of S. Leonardo 40 Year Old. You know, one of those old really amazing ones. So no shame in that.

Score: 95 points. Scores were split between this and the S. Leonardo, with slightly more people preferring the S. Leonardo 4-3 (with 1 not voting). Those who preferred this Port were entranced by its obvious age and its structure, while those who preferred the S. Leonardo enjoyed its roundness and silky mouthfeel. I scored the two Ports the same but gave the nod to the S. Leonardo.

[Eric Ifune]

I think I still have a bottle and a half.

[Glenn E.]

I think I still have a bottle and a half.

I don't feel like there's any rush to drink them. You just have to be really careful when opening them to keep the super fine sediment out. That sediment seems to affect the flavor as well as the texture, even if you use cheesecloth to decant. (Even cheesecloth doesn't filter it completely... it's that fine.)

[Eric Ifune]

Good to know.