Port – Vintage and Tawny
Which port in a storm?
Ian Hickinbotham
Ian Hickinbotham, author of Australian Plonky
Winter in Australia is fast approaching, and with it log fires, winter fare – and port. There are basically two types of port, Vintage Port and Tawny Port. Broadly, 'Vintage' means aged in bottle, whereas 'Tawny' means aged in barrel.
It follows that Vintage Port is wine of one vintage (as the name implies) whereas Tawny comprises wines of several years, in practice, due to a combination of evaporation and wine soaking into the oak of the barrels.
(Fifty years ago, when most Australian wine was 'Tawny Port', cellar hands carried 'yo-yos' in their overall pockets. They were rubber tubing used for syphoning the odd drink during the day's cellar work. Winery managers deplored, but also agonised over the practice because those cellar hands knew which barrels contained the best wine!)
Back then it was also an Australian practice to apply a 'vintage' label to bottles of Tawny Port. The year used to be calculated by simple arithmetic. Thus for this blend:
1,000 litres of 30 year old wine = 30,000
10,000 litres of 5 year old wine = 50,000
Add these together for a total
11,000 litres of wine = 80,000
Dividing 80,000 by 11,000 means 7 years average age, approximately.
However, some 30 years ago, our authorities decreed that bottles of Australian Tawny Port must not have a year on their labels as the practice was confusing and bordering on dishonest. Noble theorists asserted there could only be one type of Vintage Port!
The same thinking does not pertain to Vintage Port, as it is indeed the wine of one vintage and is aged in bottle. Accordingly, the normal sediments that wines develop (due mainly to them being insoluble in the alcohol) and which are removed before sale of most wine types, happens in the bottle of Vintage Port. So, it is customary to decant the wine before drinking, leaving considerable 'crust' in the empty bottle.
However, rather like a dry red, Vintage Port should be drunk in one session, otherwise it progressively loses varietal aroma. This last fact led to its near demise in Australia as the wine was an ingredient of the 'business lunch', but the drinking of the contents of a whole bottle became a social 'no-no' with the advent of the 0.05% blood alcohol driving regulation, followed by the loss of tax-deductible status of the 'business lunch'.
I know about the demise of Vintage Port because I was a restaurateur at the time. The need to decant all Vintage Port drove drinking it to the restaurant trade. Especially, given the pace of modern living, carrying a bottle of Vintage Port to a luncheon or dinner is just not practical!
The word Port is a derivation from Oporto, the city in Portugal, which has also been shortened to 'Porto'. Though Australians know the type of wine pertaining to the shortened word, 'Port', we have to relearn and give another same sometime soon as a result of a recent international agreement, as the word really pertains to the wine made in Portugal.
Ian Hickinbotham, one of the most innovative and influential oenologists in Australia over his 50 year career, is the author of Australian Plonky (see related reviews below).
Editor's note: Stanton and Killeen in Rutherglen are the only winegrowers who nowadays regularly make Vintage Port to my knowledge. If anyone knows of any others, or if you have suggestions for a new name for port, please let us know »
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