Great Vintage Port Tasting

Vintage 1995

The Wine Society the 18%, founded in 1993, started holding what we now call Great Tastings, 20 years ago, in 2005. These Great Tastings cover at least 20 different Vintages from the year or producer, often many more as we normally have collected most of the bottles available on the market over many decades. Since the first Great Tasting we have covered most of the great vintages in the second half of the 20th century. A full list is available here.

On May the 15th 2025 we arranged a Great Tasting of the 1995 vintage. We have ranked the 1995 vintage as an Excellent year for vintage port. After the Outstanding vintage of 1994, the 1995 vintage came a bit in the shadows, but was generally appreciated already when it was young and we have continued to love many of the wines from this vintage over the years. Now, at 30 years of age, the wines should in general be peaking, so the expectations were high. There were almost as many different 1995 Vintage Ports made as in the bigger vintage 1994, and we know of more than 60 different brands, see here for all declared producers and for even more tasting notes of the Vintage.

In this tasting we had first selected 24 bottles to be tasted in 2 flights in the Wine Society 18%. Then we had an extra flight of 10 additional vintages tasted by the three of us, Sten, Jörgen and Stefan. This flight was held two days after the official tasting, on May 17, and the group points for these 10 vintage ports are the average of the points from the three of us.

Our conclusion after the tasting, is that Vintage 1995 delivers great wines in general, many are peaking, some have already past its peak, and some still have some more years before they are on top. Many of the presumed top producers made great vintage ports, like Fonseca Guimaraens, Quinta do Vargellas from Taylor’s, both regular and the special Vinha Velha variant, Quinta do Vesuvio were all among the top. We also very much appreciated Ferreira, Krohn, Quinta de Roriz and perhaps the biggest surprise Presidential from C da Silva.

First flight:

Second flight:

Extra flight:

Tasting notes. Note that the points are for the actual bottle tasted. Read about how we set point on the page "How to understand our points valuations"

Sort on: Name Sten's rank Jörgen's rank Stefan's rank Group's rank

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