[conspire] OT: Port wines

[Rick Moen]

Pro bono publico.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2015 00:53:18 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Duncan MacKinnon <duncan1 at gmail.com>
Subject: Port wines

At Costco, you asked me about the different sort of port wines, and I
said it wasn't simple and promised to tell you later.  Now is later.  ;->

First thing, and you probably know this, a port is a _fortified_ wine
from the vicinity of Oporto (ergo 'port') along the Douro River valley 
in north Portugal.  They're always at least semi-sweet, often drunk as
dessert wines, _usually_ made from several red wine grapes.


Just like 'Madeira' fortified dessert wines from Portugal's Madeira island 
chain in the warm part of the Atlantic southwest of Portugal, ports
became famous and successful during the Napoleonic Wars because the
British ruling classes were all alkies and missed their fancy French
wines.  The only reason you could get decent wines in England was
becouse of fast wagons carrying wine across France, then fast boats
across the Channel -- which trade Napoleon nixed.  Back in the early
19th Century, you couldn't move wine much farther without it spoiling.
E.g., the English certainly knew the Italians made wine, but never had
any unless they went there.

'Oh no!  The Mayfair Upper Class Twit Club just ran out of claret
[British toff-speak for 'Bordeaux'].  Whatever shall we do?'

Spain?  Nope, that was a French ally under Napoleon's brother Joseph.
Middle Germany such as the Rhine Valley?  Maybe, except transport was
slow, and (before Bismarck) every little German state on the route
charged customs duties.  Austria?  Hungary?  Slovenia?  All too far.

Fortifying wines was basically an invention to solve this problem.  Add
distilled spirits to a cask of wine, and it'll keep for many years.

The unfortified red wines of the Douro River valley are wonderful, but
for reasons described they were unknown outside Portugul until the 20th
C.  So, they picked a crop of good red grapes, then fortified it with 
a neutral grape spirit, which raised alcohol (prevents spoilage) and
halts fermentation.  Then it's stored in barrels.


This is where you start separating the different types of ports from
each other.


Some of these new port mixes, the more promising, are put in _wooden_
barrels.  The wood breathes oxygen in, which ages the wine, improving
it.  The lesser stuff gets put into steel or concrete barrels that don't
breathe, because it's assumed not worth the trouble, and also it'll
remain a nice shiny red that'll impress suckers.

Out of this distinction you get an important divide between two types of
cheap, basic, drink-it-now port:

_Tawny_:  Cheap, not-very-aged port from wooden barrels.  This will
          be a hell of a deal and a happy experience.

_Ruby_:  Cheap, not-very-aged port from non-wooden barrels.  This is
         a port, but meh.  It's shiny-red, which some people confuse
         with good.  Don't be a sucker:  Re: cheap port, look for 'tawny'.


Right-o.  Now, we get into the subtler and more-pricey distinctions
among ports.  During the Napoleonic Wars, the British had a very
long-term presence in Portugal, and started to notice these things -- 
and also, being no fools, bought up port wineries like mad.  That's 
why almost all have English names (e.g., 'Taylor Fladgate', 'Graham',
'Warre's', 'Dow's', 'Cockburn's', 'Smith Woodhouse') to this day, the
major exception being Wiese & Krohn, named for two crazy Norwegians who
in 1865 were selling North Atlantic codfish and shipping back Portuguese
goods, and thereby discovered and bought into port madness.

Ports get better when aged in (wooden) barrels.  Port from an
exceptional year becomes -- eventually, after decades -- phenomenally
good.  Port vintners can tell to a high degree of accuracy whether a
given year is exceptional, by sampling casks at the 2-year mark of
aging.

This is when each individual port house makes an important decision:
It can either declare that year (after two years of aging) a 'vintage'
year or not.  'Vintage' in the context of port means the port house has
staked its reputation on a prediction that 10, 20, 30 years down the
road, _this_ port is going to be superb.  Such wine is bottled after 2
1/2 years in bottles saying 'vintage port' on the label.  Only 2% of
total port wine volume is 'vintage'.

The bottle you were looking at in Costco said 'vintage' on it, and that 
specifically was you were asking about.  To define it:

_Vintage_:  You buy it as a cheap-ish bottle as an optimistic gesture
   towards the future.  You leave it in temperature-stable indoor places
   for 10, 20, 30 years -- because that's how it becomes superb.  You 
   DO NOT buy it to drink it young.  That would be infanticide, and tragic.

   A vintage port from 30 years ago when sold today is no longer cheap,
   because someone else stored it for 30 years for you, and because it's
   a known quantity (as other bottles of that year have been verified to 
   have aged well, not that this is a problem).

   Cellaring new vintage port when you're young (or middle-aged and 
   healthy) is smart for the same reason and in the same bounteous 
   fashion that 401(k) plans are.  And you don't crack them open young
   for much the same reasons you don't want to do that with a 401(k).

2008, for example, was declared a vintage year by essentially all port
houses.  I bought several bottles of Taylor-Fladgate vintage 2008 port
in 2010 after hearing good health news suggesting I might live to enjoy
superb port in 2040.


_LBV_ (Late Bottled Vintage):  This is a waste not, want not
repurposing.  Say there's a vintage port in casks.  At the 2 1/2 
year mark, it ought to be bottled, but say there hasn't been much
demand for that year's vintage port for some reason -- so it has
remained in barrel for additional years.  Well, the vintner can look
on the bright side:  It's been aged, ergo it's improved by that number
of years.  (Barrel aging is faster than bottle aging.)  So, you get
a large part of the experience of drinking a 20-y.o. vintage port
without the wait.  And without most of the high cost.


_Colheita_:  Imagine a tawny from a particular year is pretty good, but
    wasn't a year declared 'vintage'.  That might be stored in barrel 
    for (up to) decades on the usual theory of 'aging improves'.  This
    is Colheita (which is Portuguese for 'harvest').  It'll say the year
    of grape harvest on the bottle plus the year of bottling, and will 
    have been aged in barrel for at least 7 years but usually a lot more.  
    So, you get the benefit of aging, and it can be really good, but not 
    world-class like an aged vintage port.


There are other minor categories such as 'single quinta', where 'quinta' 
means wine estate (i.e. one vineyard area), and several others
categories that are pretty much marketing gimmicks.



So, basically, to sum:

Buy vintage port only if you have a TARDIS or wish yourself or others to 
be happy many years from now.

Buy tawny port for nice, cheap port to drink today.

Buy a colheita if you think you can beat the calendar, want aged port to 
drink today, and the price is right.

Buy someone else's aged vintage port if you think he/she is crazy enough 
to resell it for cheap, and that he/she hasn't managed to somehow ruin it
during many years of storage.  (Fortunately, fortified wine is robust.)



----- End forwarded message -----