An Ancient Colheitas Dinner

[Alex Bridgeman]

6 Ancient Colheitas

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In early June 2023 I had the good fortune to be one of seven wine-lovers who took part in a dinner which featured 6 venerable barrel matured Ports in the dark depths of Otto's French Restaurant on Gray's Inn Road in London. The evening started with a sparkle - with two bottles of Salon le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs, from the 1995 and 1996 vintages.

Fabulous Champagne

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Maison Salon was established in 1905 by Eugène-Aimé Salon, created with the sole purpose of making the very best Champagne possible for his own personal consumption. Eugène-Aimé made his fortune as a furrier to the high society of Paris and Europe and had a considerable wealth. He chose land in the best terroir - Le Mesnil-sur-Oger - and used what he considered to be the finest Champagne grape, Chardonnay. No compromise as to quality was allowed and all wines bottled were vintage wines with no multi-year blending. If a vintage dd not produce the quality needed, no Champagne was made. In the 20th century, only 37 vintages were produced.

It's not true to say that absolutely no compromises were made. Eugène-Aimé did make one in the 1920s. Under gentle pressure from friends who would visit him and taste his Champagne, he relented a little and started to permit a small amount of production to be sold to friends and family. Today Maison Salon is run as a sister company to Delamotte, with Salon and Delamotte being independent members of the Laurent-Perrier group.

These two very special Champagnes were a wonder to taste. So distinctive and so different, each revealing clearly the unique aspects of the two vintages.

1995
Such a wonderful honeyed wine on the nose; sweet white fruit and honeysuckle perfume. A mature wine on the palate, rich and full of brioche, butter, honey and Amalfi lemon. An explosion of flavour on the aftertaste and a long lemon finish. Rich and mature and just so incredibly delicious! 97/100.

1996
What an amazing contrast between vintages! The 1996 is bright lemon on the nose, fresh, mineral and vivacious. The acidity on the palate is refreshing and full of vitality, matching beautifully the grapefruit and lemon oil, so bright and vibrant. Wonderful grapefruit oil finish of incredible length. Stunning, just stunning.  98/100.

There was a very interesting discussion as to which wine was better. I loved the freshness and acidity of the 1996, others preferred the maturity and roundness of 1995. A quick show of hands revealed a 5:2 split in favour of the 1995.

[Alex Bridgeman]

With a pair of wonderful Champagnes having been drunk, we moved on to the food. Starters varied with some choosing escargots while I chose Coquilles Saint Jacques. Finding a wine to go with all the starters proved to be a challenge - but one which Otto easily rose. He recommended the 2021 Condrieu by Guigal, which did really well with the varied foods chosen by all.

White for the starters

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[Alex Bridgeman]

For our main course we had ordered two Bresse chickens and two plates of Tournedos Rossini. The chickens are very special, with a flavour completely different from anything we can normally buy in the UK - and totally spoil roast chicken for me for months. The nearest I can get is to buy a free range chicken from Creedy Carver Farm. Expensive but so worth the extra cost!

I digress. I should be writing about the wine we had to accompany the chicken, which was served as two courses. The breast meat and Tournedos Rossini as the first course with the leg meat served as the second course. Two bottles of 1979 Chateau Leoville Las Cases were opened to accompany the chicken. This was delightful mature claret showing at its best. One bottle was showing older than the other, with the fruit starting to dry out just a little. On the other hand the younger bottle had plenty of fruit, matching up perfectly with the cedar notes you find in mature claret. I rated these bottles as 88/100 and 90/100. Delicious wine to go with the delicacy and subtlety of the chicken.

Two contrasting bottles

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[Mike J. W.]

Bumping because I'm hoping to read about these Colheitas.

[mcoulson]

Pressed duck is what you need at Otto's .....

Evening sounds fab regardless

[Alex Bridgeman]

Bumping because I'm hoping to read about these Colheitas.

I haven’t forgotten, I’ve just had to do a couple of other things first.

[nac]

At some point in the future we'll have to do the Salons again, but this time add in the 1997. Maybe 2033 - the '97 might be ready by then?

[winesecretary]

The 1996 might be ready by then, too! [I drank all my 1996 Salon before its 15th birthday. It was thrilling but unforgiving. It still is.]

[Alex Bridgeman]

Apologies for the hiatus, but I finally have time to resume the tale of the Ancient Colheitas.

After the chicken, it was time for dessert — and Port! The choice of dessert varied but I was not alone in my choice of tarte tatin, intended to match the ancient wines we were about to drink.

The first Port poured was the Niepoort VV Tawny. This bottle had been stood upright for 3 weeks at the restaurant to allow the fine sediment to settle and had been decanted about an hour before we met for our Salon aperitif. While the exact bottling date isn’t known, it was believed to have been bottled in the late 1950s / early 1960s. This was a creation of Dirk Niepoort’s grandfather, who set out to make the best Tawny Port ever. To do so, he made a blend using the 1863 Garrafeira as the base wine with the other 50% of the blend being a mix of wines from the 1900 Colheita through to the 1950 Colheita.

Pote bottle shape

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Despite the 4 hour decant, this wine surprised everyone around the table with the way it evolved and opened up in the glass over the course of a couple of hours of sipping and discussing the Ports. Initially the acidity was overwhelming, but with patience the acidity became better integrated and the dates / figs / dried fruit character of the wine became more apparent. Probably no surprise since this wine has been in bottle for at least 50 years, this was the wine which changed the most between first pour and last sip.

Fragile cork!

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[Alex Bridgeman]

The five remining wines were approached in order of age, oldest to youngest. This meant starting with Scion (1855), the wine which began the fashion for offering ancient, rare and very expensive bottlings of Colheita wines. When it was offered to the market, Scion – at GBP 2,500 per bottle – was the most expensive Port ever released. The wine was bought in 2009 from a family living in the village of Prezegueda. Taylors bought the two pipes in the cellar, having lost out on the third which was rumoured to have been bought by Winston Churchill a few decades earlier. When the wine reached the Taylor cellar on 13th January 2010 it was intended to be used as part of the wine library for the 40 year old tawny blend. However, on retasting it was decided the wine was so good and so special that it deserved to be bottled and offered as one of the last commercial releases of a pre-phylloxera wine from the Douro Valley.

Rich green outer box

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Taylor’s did a lovely job of packaging and marketing the wine. 1,400 bottles were offered for sale in December 2010. Initially they sold very slowly. No Port company had offered such a rare and expensive wine at such a high release price and it took the market a couple of years to adjust to the concept and pick up the bottles. At one time you were able to visit Dick’s Bar at the Yeatman Hotel and buy a 5cl glass of Scion for EUR 99, or about half the retail price.

Lovely inner wooden box

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The wine was sold in a hand blown, crystal decanter, stoppered with a cork but accompanied by a glass stopper so the decanter could be reused once empty. The decanter came in a wooden instrument box – designed to be able to be re-used as a decorative box around the house – and with a small book telling the story of the wine along with some key moments in history which had happened while the wine was maturing in the Corgo Valley. This box went into an impressive quality dark green high density cardboard box, and then into an outer cardboard box of similar colour – no risks were being taken when shipping such a rare wine!

The contents of the box!

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[Alex Bridgeman]

The Taylor 1863 was our next wine. Two casks of this pre-phylloxera wine were acquired as part of Taylor’s purchase of Wiese & Krohn. These casks might well have been one of the first wines bought by Wiese & Krohn when they were set up in 1865. Wiese & Krohn had seen the success of Scion and wanted to realise the potential value of some of their historic stocks of wine, so were offering their own version with a two-bottle pack of the 1863 and the 1896, bottled to order, for EUR 5,000. However, from what I understand, the packs did not sell well.

A Royal Blue cardboard box

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So up stepped Taylor’s with their comparatively enormous marketing capability and global brand recognition. In 2014 Taylor’s bottled the remaining two casks of 1863 into 1,600 crystal decanters and offered a strict allocation with a launch price of £3,000. Again, the packaging was superb. To contrast with Scion, the carboard outer and high density carboard inner were a royal blue. The wooden box holding the wine a highly polished and very attractive maple burl veneer, intended to be attractive enough to be re-used as a jewellery box. The wine was in a bespoke Italian crystal decanter with a fluted base, sealed with a cork but with a glass stopper for future use. In contrast to the plain crystal Scion stopper, the 1863 stopper is engraved “TAYOR SINGLE HARVEST 1863”.

A box within a box

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The inner cardboard box

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The box within the box within the box

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Inside the wooden box

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The label is on the top of the stopper

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In an evening full of stunning wines, this was right up there with the best. I had it tied in second place, others had it as their first place wine.

[Mike J. W.]

Nice write-ups. I'm curious to see which one comes out on top after you review the other ones.

[Alex Bridgeman]

Staying with the order of vintages, next up was the Whitwham’s 1880 Millennium Port. From what I have been able to learn, there are two different Whitwham’s Millennium Ports, the 1853 and the 1880. It seems that both were identified in the 1990s by Cristiano van Zeller as family reserve wines which were of the quality needed to be able to be bottled and offered for sale. He partnered with Dirk Niepoort who tasted the wines and refreshed them with a little (around 5%) of the Niepoort 1945 Vintage Port held in bottles in the Niepoort cellars. This 1880 Millennium Ports was bottled in 2002 by Niepoort and marketed in the UK by Whitwham’s, a long-established wine merchant based in Altrincham, Lancashire. Bottles crop up on the auction market from time to time and are still drinking extremely well. This bottle was also decanted before dinner in case it had developed a sediment – which it had!

5% Niepoort 1945 VP

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Bottled in the days before these wines were packaged in ultra-luxurious boxes, this is a fine wine in its own right, a wine which might very well be wine of the night at many tastings, this lacked a little of the intensity and power that the best wines offered on this exceptional evening. However, that won’t put me off keeping an eye out for bottles for sale in the future.

[Alex Bridgeman]

The penultimate wine was the only wine from the Symingtons, Graham’s Ne Oublie from 1882. This is a wine which was bought in the 1920s by Andrew James Symington, quite possibly because that was the year he arrived in Portugal to join the wine trade. He bought four casks, one of which was used over the years in blending Graham’s 30 and 40 year old tawnies or for topping up the other three barrels of 1882. In 2014 the family Board of Directors decided to bottle one of the remaining three barrels and to release a limited edition wine (only 656 bottes) in an extremely upmarket package which paid homage to the geographic history of the Symingtons.

Nothing subtle about what's inside!

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The wine was bottled in an individually numbered handmade crystal decanter designed by Portugal’s leading glass manufacturer, Atlantis. The decanter carries three silver bands, moulded and engraved by Scottish Silversmiths Hayward & Stott. The bands were assayed and hallmarked by the Edinburgh Assay Office. The decanter was then packed into a bespoke, handcrafted leather-bound box designed and made by Smythson of Bond Street – a nod to the fact that it was a Smythson notebook Maurice Symington used to use in the 1940s when working in the vineyards and winery.

The next box has string handles

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Unlike the wonderful Scion video, which has now vanished from the internet thanks to the demise of Adobe Flash Player, the last time I checked the Ne Oublie video still works. It's a lovely, gentle few minutes which doesn't tell you much but which any Port lover will enjoy as a diversion. https://www.grahams-port.com/files/wine/NeOublie.mp4.

Black leather cover, soft suede lining

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The wine lived up to the expectations created by the packaging. It was truly phenomenal. Ne Oublie is the family motto, meaning “never forget”. A very appropriate name for such an unforgettable wine.