To taste, blind, a range of affordable Ports currently available for purchase in the UK.
To determine which is the best ‟daily drinker” currently available.
To consider whether the best ‟daily drinkers” are actually any good or not.
To decide whether the Ruby Reserve category of Port can be as good as the LBV.
Proposed date
2nd December 2010
Proposed location
The Crusting Pipe, Covent Garden, London
Potential Participants
JGH + 1
CHR + 1
AHB
DRT + 1
RAYC
Uncle Tom
Other participants are welcome, please either contact me or reply to this thread. This should be a fun, inexpensive, tasting so first-timers and lurkers are particularly welcome.
How it will work
NB. Due to having too much Port to drink in too little time, this may no longer apply to people who sign up after November 1st 2010, who may be invited to make a cash contribution to the bill instead (or something similar to be determined).
Each participant should bring to the tasting two bottles of Port. These should be relatively easily purchased in the UK (e.g. in an wine-merchant, supermarket or online). Their combined cost should be around £25. It is encouraged that they are different categories of Port (e.g. Ruby and LBV &c.).
Because the wines are to be tasted blind, participants are asked to PM jdaw1 before the tasting with three proposed purchases. jdaw1 will act as moderator and ensure that we do not have duplicate bottles.
The third bottle is important. If an attendee sends jdaw1 the names of just two ports, X and Y, and jdaw1 says ‟not X find another”, then the attendee would know that somebody else is bringing X. But if the attendee volunteers X, Y and Z, and jdaw1 says ‟bring Y and Z”, then maybe somebody else is bringing X, and maybe not. So attendees should PM jdaw1 the names of three possible ports.
On the night, bottles should be brought wrapped in tin-foil (or similar). We will then taste the wines blind, determine that we all like the Cruz basic ruby better than the Taylor 1945 and therefore sell our stocks of Vintage Port.
-Original Post-
On coming back from Portugal, I was asked a very interesting question: if you don’t currently own any Port but would like some what is the best Port for regular drinking? The catch, however, was that it had to be something actually available. Not an LBV picked up for £2.50 at Christmas; nor something bought at auction for some ridiculous discount. I was a bit stumped. Although I drink a fair bit of cheaper Ports, they are all oddities or bargains.
This fed into something else I was thinking in Portugal. I generally buy LBVs for regular drinking; I have very little Ruby or Ruby Reserve. But several times in Portugal we ended up drinking excellent Ruby Reserves and disappointing LBVs which were often twice the price of the Ruby.
I was therefore wondering if we could organise a tasting to answer these two questions. Namely: i) what are the best, readily-available Ports (and objectively, how good are they) and ii) is the LBV category a waste of money?
The format I was thinking of was a blind tasting where everyone brings two bottles. One being c.£10 or less--which covers all the big shippers’ Ruby Reserves--and one being c.£15 or less--which would allow us to try some independents’ Ruby Reserves and most of the LBV range. If we had 10 people, we would then try 20 wines, being a good representative sample of daily drinking for the UK market.
It might not be very glamorous, but it might be fun, and perhaps would be the sort of easy-access tasting that might tempt a few lurkers out of the woodwork to attend a tasting
Would anyone be interested in such a tasting? Perhaps early in December for a warm-up for the Christmas tasting?
