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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Another year has passed by and we have tasted a lot of fantastic Vintage Ports during this last year. We now have tasting notes for more than 1,500 different Vintage Ports.

We also reached the milestone of 150,000 visitors to our web site since we started it five years ago. Thank you all for visiting our site and thank you all for the kind words we here from you.

Warres1958Among the all the tastings we had during this last year there are now some new added to our section of Great Tastings. We have had tasting on both Vintage 1988 and Vintage 1958, and we also have a report from the fantastic vertical on Calem, arranged by Axel Probst, that we participated in. So please enjoy reading about these tastings.

We hope that 2017 will bring many more fantastic tastings and events. See you all next year!

 

Winter 2015

We have had a wonderful winter with some excellent tastings.

In February the Wine Society 18% in Malmö had a Semi-Great tasting (i.e. below 20 houses) of the vintage 1984, which we have already written about here. You find all our larger tastings in the special section for Great Tastings.

In March we had a very interesting tasting of all seven vintages from Quinta do Vesuvio in-between 1989-1996 in the Danish Port Wine Club est. 1981 in Copenhagen. They were all very wonderful and many of them still needs some more age in the bottle.

On the 18th of March i.e. after 3 years 2 months and 18 days we had our 100.000 visitor on our web-site. These visitors have been from more than 150 different countries! We are very surprised, but of course also happy, to see that Vintage Port seems to be popular all over the world!

Borges 1955

Easter started on Thursday and we started with Mercier vintage 2004, elegant and tasty and Ch. Mouton Rotschild 1993 with the duck breast, which was quite good and attractive. Good Friday we started with Belle Époque vintage 1990. Then we had lobster with Alsace Grand Cru Engelberg Riesling vintage 2010 from Dom. Pfister and Ch. Bouscaut vintage 2008, Grand Cru Classe from Grave. The main course was horse filet which was accompanied with Ch. Lafite Rothschild 1985 and Ch. Margeaux 1985 and the dessert was accompanied with vintage port of course. They were 1955 Borges which was old, turbid and when decanted, it looked like a white port in the beginning but muddy and terrible at the end. The cork was from Borges but said 1980!? This was not good at all. The other vintage port was Calem 1955 produced by Quinta da Foz and Santo Antonio and it was delicious.

Calem 1955Easter Eve we started with de Venoge’s  Grand Vin des Princes vintage 1993. With the pâté we had Scloss Johannisberg Riesling, auslese, Cabinet from 1893 (sic), still knit together but of course a bit dry which we maybe had expected and Ch. Filhot, Sautern from 1904 still wonderful sweet and very attractive. With the lamb we enjoyed Ch. Cheval Blanc 1985 and Ch. Latour 1985 and with the dessert we had 2 very mature and delicious vintage ports, Tuke Holdswoth 1935 and Ramos Pinto 1935. We had a nice night‘s sleep after that.

Vintage Port 1935

Semi-Great Vintage Port Tasting 1979

Vintage 1979

First we would like to announce that after about 18 months this web site has now reached 25,000 visitors!! We are of course very happy and proud to see the great interest from all over the world.

Last week we were all participating in the first of several planned 20th anniversary tastings of  the Wine Society 18%. We have decided to hold some extra tastings during the year 2013 and we started our celebration with a Vintage tasting of 1979.

This Vintage was an off vintage, and was judge as Average. The large producers did not declare, they instead declared their Single Quinta Vintages like Quinta do Bomfim (Dow’s) and Quinta da Cavadinha (Warre’s). According to the Port Wine Institute only 13 houses declared. Michael Broadbent gave this vintage ** out of 5*, Suckling gave it 74 points out of 100 points.

Vintages1979

We call it Semi-Great because we had only 11 Vintages and not 20 Vintages which is our limit for calling it a Great Tasting.  In addition to the 11 Vintages we had two extra ports from 1979, LBV 1979 from Smith-Woodhouse, bottled in 1984 and Colheita 1979 from Niepoort, bottled in 1988. Both extra wines were included in the tasting and were given points. The Smith-Woodhouse LBV had Group points 15.63 and Group Ranking 7 and Niepoort’s Colheita 1979 had Group Points 14.7 and Group Ranking 11.

Most of the Vintage Ports showed a very mature pale tawny like colour, but they were surprisingly fresh in the glass and many of them showed a nice elegancy even if they were a bit over their peak. Two of eleven bottles were unfortunately too old.

As usual the Vintages from the Symingtons (Quinta da Cavadinha, Quinta do Bomfim and Grahams Malvedos) were very well preserved, being a bit darker in colour and still some fruit in the taste. We  agreed that Quinta do Bomfim and Grahams Malvedos were the best.

Read more, also tasting notes, here…

1933 Double Quinta Vintage Port

We would like to thank you all for visiting our web site and for all supPORT. Last year was fantastic with more visitors than we could ever dream of. We had around 19.000 visitors during 2012 from 94 different countries. December is as you know a great month for drinking Port and during this month we had 3556 visitors from 67 countries with a peak at Christmas Eve with 271 visitors! On the 15th of January we reached 100 different countries visiting us and now in the end of January 107 countries have done a visit. Please continue sending suggestions so we can improve our web site. We appreciate all the positive feedback and will continue to evolve the web site with more information and more features in the future. And don’t worry; we will continue to provide all this for free!

We have changed the web site so you can now add comments and answer our posts directly on the page.

QuintaFozSantaAntonio1933c

During summer we had a Calem from 1933 where the label told us that the vintage was from two different quintas: Quinta da Foz and Quinta Santo Antonio. Have anyone seen two different quintas on the same label before? We cannot remember seeing such a Double Quinta Vintage Port before.