For The Love Of Port

Roy:
She decided that it was to fattening and that she would rather get her calories elsewhere. You know women...when they get an idea in their heads it never leaves. Any way I have found a new port drinker to share a few bottles with and we just enjoyed a 2000 Smith Woodhouse. A much underrated port and one of the best QPR's on the market today. Every few months I seem to find it being sold very inexpensively??? Love it, Love it, Love it.

The problem with buying or collecting vintage port is that one always starts to late.....At least when you like to drink them matured.
I try to backfill my cellar, but unfortunately the availability and the prices of older VP in my country are not as they are f.i. in the U.K.
So now and then I buy some older VP, but I seem to drink as much of them as I buy during the year, so my cellar doesn't expand with older ports..... After the 2003 VP I stopped buying new releases, due to my age (oh my, that sounds old ), but when I read the thread were mr. Guimaraens explains some things about the fortifying spirit and the decreasing of the dumb phase, I might buy some 2007 and 2009 anyway and try to enjoy them younger.
I do however almost allways open one bottle young when I've bought a 6-pack. But must admit, I prefer them mature.

Regards, Monique.

In the 1990s, when I was in my late 20s and early- to mid 30s I was buying around 8 cases per year of cellar-worthy wine and drinking about half the quantity I bought; there were about 250-300 bottles in my "cellar" and about 30% was port with the balance being mostly claret.

By the early-00s I had realised that I wanted my main focus to be port - vintage port - and had started to buy more of both new releases and older port. At that time I was buying 1-4 cases a year more than I was consuming, but still without a real strategy or clarity about what I was trying to achieve with my buying.

In 2006 I started to model how much port I drink, what age profile I like and used this to predict how many bottles of which vintages I should have in my cellar. Over the next 5 years I bought heavily and built my cellar up to the levels where I should now have enough port to keep me going for the rest of my drinking days provided I continue to buy 1-2 cases of new releases for the next 25-30 years - that will keep my thirst for young fruit-driven port quenched while also allowing some of it to mature to the early stages of perfection.

Now most of my non-new release buying is opportunistic, picking up interesting oddments or rarities while drinking my way through a balanced cellar that should remain balanced over the next 30 years as I drink the stuff that is currently mature and allow it to be replaced by what is quite youthful today but will be in its mid-twenties in 2025.

I do like to buy odd numbers of new release ports - 15 bottles of Vesuvio 2009, for example - with a view to opening one the year of release, another after 5 years and another after about 10 years just to see how the port changes. I would normally not break open a full case until the port was 21 years or older.