Beginning to Appreciate Port

In the past, I’ve not been a big fan of Port. It was a sort of palatal blind spot for me. Often, I could taste nothing in it but sugar. Even the most highly esteemed bottles have often left me cold, since I couldn’t get past the sweetness. In a wine world where Port is an object of devotion, this disability has often earned me much pity – and not a few sneers – from my wine colleagues.

In recent years, however, I’ve found my tolerance – and even my enjoyment – of Port gradually increasing. Why, I’m not sure, but my current theory is that my aging body requires more fructose than I’ve been giving it. Whatever the cause, I’ve begun tentatively enjoying some bottles of a small trove of Ports that over the years I’ve willy-nilly accumulated. I wish I could say it was incredible foresight, but no, it was pure blind luck.

Recently, a small crisis (well, a crisis for a wine nut) pushed me to open a venerable bottle of Port from Croft: 1983 Quinta Da Roeda Vintage Porto. While searching for something completely different in my wine closet, I noticed fresh wine drips in the Port bin. The culprit turned out to be this particular bottle, whose cork had apparently just failed.
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I pulled it out, cleaned it up, and attempted to pull the cork, which promptly crumbled to pieces, thus necessitating decanting and filtering to remove the fine cork bits. That was one dead cork, but the upshot was a good use of a handsome Victorian Port decanter I had bought many years ago, which until now had served exclusively as a decorative object. It always pleases me to see things find their proper use (and that, of course, includes the human palate).
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I didn’t really know what to expect of this wine. The probability was that it was dead, but Port handles exposure to oxygen very well, so there was a remote chance it would still be drinkable. Well, it was – surprisingly fresh, though dominated by mature flavors, in a range that I thought of as maderized, in the very best Madeira sense of the word.

This was intriguing enough that I made up my mind to try a totally sound bottle of Port soon, to see how much more there might be to it than I had experienced. Hence a recent winter evening’s dessert..
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Walnuts and roasted hazelnuts, dried figs and dried apricots, and a bottle of 1994 Churchill’s Late Bottled Vintage Port. For a light dinner before this simple but extremely rich dessert, Diane had prepared a cheese soufflé, which set up our palates perfectly for the range of sweetnesses to follow.

The LBV – Port drinker’s shorthand, I have learned – surprised me. Yes, it was sweet, as I had expected, but most of that sweetness lurked behind an intriguing veil of maderized, mature wine flavors. It was in no way cloying (as I had feared), but it was intensely rich – and very easy on the palate, despite its high (20˚) alcohol. (It is a fortified wine, after all.)
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It loved the hazelnuts (as did I) and tolerated the walnuts and dried fruits. The concentrated sweetness of the fruits competed too much with the Port’s own sweetness to make a fully comfortable match, at least for my palate, but the pairing was illuminating. For me, the Port showed its best on its own, without any other palatal distraction.

So the moral of the story is this: I will never be a big Port fan, but Port is definitely not the straight sugar cocktail it so long seemed to me to be. I don’t think that Port producers have changed very much, so it must be that my palate has evolved as I’ve gotten older. I’ll give one cheer for that.