For The Love Of Port

Many if not most of us old-school Port drinkers, (meaning we're over 50 or over 60 years of age) started with drinking Vintage Ports, which was very typical at the time many of us got started.

But those who have only started drinking Port in the past decade, what category (or categories) of Port did you start off drinking? What was the attraction and do you remember the very first Port you tasted?

Please share your experience!

I'm one of the weird ones - I'm old but not really old school, and I started with Tawny Port and didn't really get into VP for probably 10 years.

My first Port ever was a half bottle of Porto Rocha 20 Year Old Tawny Port given to me for my 40th birthday. I still have the empty bottle!

My first 2 VP purchases were a 1970 Martinez and a 1977 Royal Oporto. Ironically, I've never opened either of them and still have them. I also still have some of the 1994 Broadbent VPs that I bought from Roy which was my first multi-bottle purchase of VP, as well as the empty bottle from the 1983 Warre that was the first "old" Port that I opened.

The very first Port I tasted I couldn't possibly recall because I was around 8-9 years old and my grandmother would give me a teaspoon on rare occasion.

I'm pretty confident it was a tawny though, and this was in Brazil around 1999, and my grandmother lived on a pension, so it was probably some Ramos Pinto Reserve Tawny if I had to guess.

I didn't pay attention to Port until a few years ago, bought a Taylor Ruby during COVID and it was fine, that wasn't the bottle that "converted" me though. After buying it, I did think at the time that Port is really the perfect beverage for long term storage for society-disrupting events like Covid though. It's perhaps a bit embarrassing to say that I rediscovered Port through "prepping," if you want to call it that. Even though I have done some research since, to know that preppers themselves do not seem to appreciate how useful Port would be to their endeavors. If they ever figure it out, bye bye to our cheap VPs because there's a lot of them.

Some months after I bought the bottle that led me to acquire Port more seriously, which was a 2008 Warre's LBV. That, and finding this forum and devouring old threads here for info!

In France, I've always been exposed to the supermarket ports (Cruz is everywhere). They have a strong reputation of good dirt-cheap aperitif wines, a lot of people will have one bottle casually opened for months and months. So not the best intro to port ever Occasional encounters with nice tawnies (10 years mostly) here and there showed me that there was more to it than the supermarket wines, but I had no ideas VP and Colheitas even existed.

First real encounter was visiting Porto + Douro, I always add the local vineyards visit + tasting when I'm in a wine region. Got hooked through the SQVP and LBV's I tried, then slowly to more serious VP as the budget grows.

Hi Clement and welcome to the forum. There's lots of people here with extensive knowledge about Port, so feel free to ask anything.

It sounds like finding good Port might be difficult in France. One option that you might want to consider if you haven't already are wine auctions. I can't speak to the quality of the auction houses in mainland Europe, but I do know there's an auction house based in Paris by the name of Ideal Wine (idealwine.com/en).

Mike J. W. wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:23 am I can't speak to the quality of the auction houses in mainland Europe, but I do know there's an auction house based in Paris by the name of Ideal Wine (idealwine.com/en).

A good advice indeed! I have been religiously scanning idealwine for some months now, with a few nice finds. Not later than this morning, some Taylor’s 2009! I've also made the occasional mistakes, like a Cruz VP 1989 (I had not found this forum yet, I did not know any better )

My first Port was a ruby port still in a paper bag while camping with friends back in the mid 90's.
I was not a fan.

At some point around 2010 I was introduced to a 1984 Warres Vintage port. It was a long slow evening with a glass of port every 90 minutes so we could observe the effect of oxidization.

Ever since then I have been searching for the perfect port for me. I try to host a port tasting every 6 to 9 months, but when I look at the calendar it seems like my last one was in August of 2024. Yesterday I returned home from my second trip Portugal, so I really hope I can get a tasting scheduled in November.

I will be typing up notes from that trip over the next 2 or 3 weeks. I learned a lot, I like port more then ever, and I still don't know how to find and buy a vintage I will love at a price I can afford. The best answer I got about this question was to "build a matrix" with quintas and houses on one axis, and years on the other axis. In the mean time I keep buying 20 and 30 year tawney, and colheita's that I like.

Apparently I am addicted to port.

TYM