158 Port anD the Douro
coffee on the nose. Tawny marmalade,
candied peel on the palate with a rancio
character often evident. Some wines are
overblown and cloying. Tiny quantities
are bottled and – needless to say – the
wines are expensive!colheita
Often misunderstood, the Portuguese word colheita (pronounced col-yate-a) means ‘harvest’
and, by extension, can be confused with ‘vintage’. Like vintage Port, a colheita is the product
of a single harvest but the wine is aged in wood for a minimum of seven years by which time
it will have begun to take on an oxidative, tawny character. In practice most colheitas are
aged for considerably longer, the casks or vat being racked and topped up periodically (in
theory with the same wine) to replace that lost by evaporation. The wines take on secondary
aromas and flavours, losing colour and gaining in richness, sweetness and intensity the
longer they mature in wood. Without recourse to blending and refreshing, some colheitas
look distinctly tired by the time they come to be bottled and in comparative tastings they
can fare much less well than blended tawnies with a comparable average age. Two dates
appear on the label of a colheita Port: the year of the harvest (i.e. the colheita) and the
year of bottling. The latter is significant
as the wine will not generally improve in
bottle (although after prolonged oxidative
ageing in wood it won’t deteriorate that
quickly either). It is not uncommon to
find colheitas from the early years of the
twentieth century still on sale in grocers’
shops in Lisbon and Oporto but wines
from post-war years tend to be more
reliable. Some shippers maintain stocks
of wine still in wood, dating back prior
to colheitas in the 1930s, many of which
have distinct overtones of vinagrinho.
White Port with an indication of age
Wood-ageing lends character to a well made white Port, turning it tawny in colour and
flavour with age. Indeed, old white Ports may form part of an aged tawny blend. White
Ports that have been aged in wood can now be marketed with the ten-, twenty-, thirty- or
forty-year-old designation provided they have met the requisite standard of the IVDP’s
Câmara de Provadores. Rare whites like Quinta Santa Eufemia’s Very Old Reserve and
colheitas like the 1952 from C. da Silva or Niepoort’s exceptional wine from 1895 present
a rich, honeyed complexity comparable to well-aged tawny.
Pick of forty-year-old tawny
Graham
sandeman
taylorPick of colheita
Barão de Vilar
dalva
Graham
Kopke
Krohn
niepoort
Quinta do noval
Poças