ThePortForum.com

John Danza

We're pulling together a 1985 horizontal 30-year retrospective in Chicago, to be held on February 26, 2016. If you might be interested, please check out this thread on FTLOP. Thanks!

John Danza

Thanks for posting, John. Is there an online resource where you can access these back volumes of the Journal? Not that I know of. I own a bunch of them because I collect them, being on the board of governors. I need to look through them more often, as I tend to buy them when I find them but then do...

John Danza

I recently found an article in the August 1982 issue of The Journal of the International Wine & Food Society titled Cockburn Vintage Ports 1863-1975. I found this article pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it gives some thoughts about the various vintages that we might not hear t...

John Danza

2000 Presidential Vintage Port 2000 Presidential Porto Vintage - Portugal, Douro, Porto (12/26/2010) Double decanted from magnum several hours before serving. Medium purple in color with no browning. Raisins and plums on the palate with a bit of alcoholic heat and only moderate sweetness. 24 hours ...

John Danza

Wow, nice job Derek! You really pulled this out of the archives.

John Danza

uncle tom wrote:A '91 vs '92 event needs to be held at some point; but maybe not for a year or two..

Great idea Tom. It would be good to do it in 2011 or 2012 as the 20th anniversary of one of the two vintages.

John Danza

I find it kind of interesting that one clearly bad bottle of Fonseca is leading a host of people to conclude that the 1992 vintage was over-hyped. It sounds like there's a general concensus that Vesuvio is not good. There was a mention of Passadouro, however my experience is that this wine struggles...

John Danza

Just seeing this thread now, and wondering if there is anything people would like to add. My experience w/ 1992 is fairly limited (Vesuvio, Fonseca, and Niepoort), but it is fairly 'meh' to my palate, with the Niepoort showing much better than the other two, but not close to its 1994 or even 2003. ...

John Danza

This evening I opened a 1985 Warre on the spur of the moment, but I was able to give it 3 hours in the decanter. This is the second of three bottles I bought at one time. This one, like the last a couple of years ago, showed a wine that's fully mature and actually in a state of decline. The color wa...

John Danza

Congratulations Julian to you and your entire family! My wife and I have toasted you all with the 1977 Warre, which was great in every respect. Here's hoping that 2009 will be a great vintage year for those birth year wines you'll lay away for little Maximillian.

John Danza

Julian,

What fabulous news! I hope all goes well today for your wife, and for you of course. A 1977 Warre has just been decanted and is waiting in the wings.

Best of luck,
John

John Danza

I've had this wine many times and never encountered the minty notes nor the browning. Sounds like a bad bottle.

John Danza

I had this wine yesterday at a friend's house. He had purchased it upon release and kept it in an excellent passive cellar. It was decanted 3 hours prior to service. The wine was dark red with no evidence of browning, but I expect was losing color as Taylor is usually a pretty black wine when young....

John Danza

I opened a bottle of this wine yesterday, in preparation for a dinner at a friend's house. I double decanted it (poured into decanter, cleaned out bottle, returned it to the bottle for transportation) about 6 hours before it was served. The fill had been base neck. The wine, in a word, was tremendou...

John Danza

Sounds like a bad bottle. The 27 Taylor I had 2 years ago was fabulous, still medium red with some browning. Very balanced tannins and alcohol. It opened up in the decanter and you would have thought it was a 1963, it was that fresh. I've seen other notes about the 27 Taylor that are consistent with...

John Danza

I use a white wine glass typically. It makes me crazy when restaurants or some people pull out these little glass "thimbles" for port. I don't know anyone that only drinks about 2 ounces of port, and you certainly can't swirl the wine it them.

John Danza

For some reason, I can't find the original posting that I made. Administrators, did you take it down? No, I promoted it to the brand new Reference forum. BTW, the first post in this thread is copied from the wrong place. Hi Julian, When I click on the original link in my first post, I get this erro...

John Danza

For some reason, I can't find the original posting that I made. Administrators, did you take it down? I just received the following from the Penguin Group relative to permissions: Dear Mr Danza, Thank you for your email. I am afraid that I have been unable to trace the original contract or any other...

John Danza

Maurice Healy was a close personal friend of Andre Simon and many other of the "movers and shakers" in the English wine business of the 1930s and 1940s. A lawyer by trade, most of his interest in wine was driven by his association with both Andre Simon and AJA Symons, the primary founders ...

John Danza

In the thread titled Stay Me With Flagons by Maurice Healy , John Danza wrote: This thread contains the text of the chapter on Port in André L. Simon’s book Vintagewise, as typed by jdaw1. There will doubtless be errors in the typing, and readers may well have other comments. Please post correction...

John Danza

This thread contains the text part of the chapter on Port in Maurice Healy's book Stay Me With Flagons , as typed by John Danza. There will doubtless be errors in the typing, and readers may well have other comments. Please post corrections and comments in the thread Stay Me With Flagons: Correction...

John Danza

[Starting on page 211, near the end of the chapter on Port, which consisted mostly of history of the winemaking and the technicalities of the winemaking. The following text relates the author's personal notes about port in general and some specific ports Port My judgment on Port was destroyed at th...

John Danza

Stay Me With Flagons
A book about wine & other things
by Maurice Healy (1887-1943), published by Michael Joseph Ltd., 26 Bloomspury Street, London, W.C. 1 (now part of Penguin Books)
First published in 1940, this copy is a first impression and is autographed by the author.

John Danza

In keeping with Julian's request to post Port-related information from old, out-of-print wine books, I will reproduce several pages of text from this book. Permission to reproduce has been submitted to Penguin Books, who purchased the original publisher Michael Joseph, Ltd. This is the text of an em...

John Danza

Thank you very much Julian for bringing attention to this book, one of my favorite by Andre Simon. My collection of wine books specializes in those by Andre, along with some others by his friends that were involved with him in the founding of both The Saintsbury Club and The Wine & Food Society....

John Danza

1963 Offley Baron de Forrester Colheita The label on this bottle noted that the wine had been "matured in wood" and "bottled in 1988". There was some fine sediment that had built up along the side of the bottle, but as soon as I went to decant the wine it reintegrated back into ...

John Danza

This wine was served with dessert at a dinner I attended last night. It was dissappointing. I agree with Julian that this was not Taylor's best effort in a long run. At best, medium to light ruby in color. There's a little alcohol heat on the palate, but not oppressive. The wine had very little swee...

John Danza

Thanks very much guys. I appreciate the help.

John Danza

Thanks very much! One follow up question. What's the proper service temperature for Belgian beer? Should it be cold, cool, or room temp?

John Danza

Hello all, I need your recommendations on the best Belgian beers, preferably those available in the U.S. I'm going to a great BYOB restaurant in a few weeks, and the chef is really into Belgian beer. I would like to bring some for he and the kitchen team, because it's always good to keep the chefs h...

John Danza

This wine is bottled by Niepoort, but is definitely not their standard VP bottling. The wine was tasted after being double decanted (once into the decanter, then put back in the bottle for transportation after rinsing the bottle with ruby port), with the tasting occuring 3 hours after the decanting....

John Danza

RonnieRoots wrote:Yet another victim of the mysterious '85 VA disease...

I know I've heard this was happening, but this is the first time I've run into it. I haven't experienced it in any bottles of Fonseca, Dow, or Warre's.

John Danza

I'm not so sure you had a bad bottle. I opened a bottle today because I had read conflicting notes on this wine, so I thought I better try the one I have. This bottle looked great, so I think storage conditions were ok. Upon initial decanting, the color was very light red, with very little nose. The...

John Danza

1985 Croft I measured in inches using a micrometer and converted it ti millimeters using a website. Cork data: Length: 1.952 in. / 49.6 mm Cork diameter at top: .684 in / 17.4 mm Cork diameter at bottom: .852 in / 21.6 mm Bottle inside neck diameter: .666 in / 16.9 mm I can only attribute the neck ...

John Danza

g-man wrote:
jdaw1 wrote:Their opener was a needle that went through the cork and shot compressed air popping out the cork

That's assuming the bottle doesn't explode, which has been known to happen on more than a few occassions with these openers. Definitely not for use with bottles 50+ years old.

John Danza

I don't like the fact that the screw goes all the way through the cork so I will try to be a bit more subtle. In my experience, and looking at it from a physics perspective, I think completely penetrating the cork is the only way for a corkscrew to sucessfully remove a port cork. If the entire cork...

John Danza

After years of breaking port corks, and not liking the port tongs idea, I looked far and wide for a screwpull-like corkscrew that would have a worm long enough to fully penetrate the cork before it started to lift it from the bottle. It took a couple of years, but I finally found one in a wine shop ...

John Danza

Thanks for the notes Julian. I have only one bottle left of the '63 Graham and have been waiting for a good opportunity to open it. I'm glad it's still holding up well. I've held on to this bottle because it and its mate were the first bottles of VP I ever purchased when I got really interested in w...

John Danza

Hi Julian,

I guess I pulled the trigger too soon. I check the American website and I can't use my free ticket on those days that I noted as open in March. I'll have to pass. Bummer!

John Danza

Hi Julian, I would love to attend, as I have a free airline ticket burning a hole in my pocket. Unfortunately, the latter half of March is pretty tight for me and the only dates that would work would be the evening of Friday the 14th or Friday the 28th. If one of those ends up being the date and you...

John Danza

Hello all, This dinner is going to be postponed until the spring of 2009. Unfortunately, the chef I'm working with is leaving the restaurant he's at now and opening his own place in a year. I want to still work with him on the dinner, so I need to push it back. I'll post something on it when we get ...

John Danza

Hi Julian (and all others not in the Chicago area), I did some checking on hotels. If you wanted to stay at the O'Hare Hilton to make it convenient to your flights, they're quoting a rate as low as $169.00 per night on that weekend. You can then catch a taxi back and forth to the restaurant, or I wo...

John Danza

Thank you for telling us. How expensive would be accommodation in the vicinity? Hi Julian, I'll check on some options and post them. There are a couple of overall choices that I'll check out. One is to stay in downtown Chicago and take the commuter train to Lake Forest, which stops a block from the...

John Danza

Hello all, I wanted to make you aware of an event I'm arranging for the Northern Illinois branch of the International Wine & Food Society. I'm doing a Madeira Party, similar to those held in the 19th century. It will be held on Saturday, May 10 at Bank Lane Bistro in Lake Forest, IL., a suburb o...

John Danza

John , I see these went for around the £250 mark. Now although I would have loved one, for its rarity, and kudos, you can pick up Taylors 77 for £60 regularly on Winesearcher, so the juice itself wasn't a bargain. Is that unfair? Would it still be considered a bargain in the US? Do you generally pa...

John Danza

Hello all, I just got an email that The Chicago Wine Company is doing a clearance on 2003 Quinta do Noval because they're supplier is dropping the brand. The price is $49.50 per 750ml bottle. Here's the contact info if you're interested: Simon Lambert The Chicago Wine Company 835 N. Central Wood Dal...

John Danza

Good flavor, mostly raisins and nuts. A little thinner texture than I anticipated for a tawny of this age. The alcohol was a little hot upon opening, but dissipated fairly quickly, within the first 30 minutes. Good for the price ($10 at auction as a bin end), but probably would pay as much as $25 fo...

John Danza

Thanks everyone for the updates. I'll sit on these bottles for a few years and then give them a go. I'll post notes when I finally open them.

John

John Danza

Those on Death Row over the next couple of months include:

VP:
1977 Warre
1983 Warre
1985 Warre
1966 Dow
1985 Croft

Colheita/Tawny:

1978 Krohn
Churchill 10-year Tawny
Graham 20-year Tawny
Taylor 30-year Tawny

Should be a good fall and winter.

John Danza

I've never found these to work. Also, the air you're sucking out of the bottle is also some aroma, which I would rather be smelling. With port, I've kept good ports that were open up to three weeks in my cellar with no degradation at all.

ThePortForum.com

Search found 65 matches

1985 horizontal in Chicago - February 26, 2016

Re: Historical Perspective - Cockburn Vintage Ports from 1863 to

Historical Perspective - Cockburn Vintage Ports from 1863 to

2000 Dalva

Re: Vintagewise: Corrections and Comments

Re: Is '92 the most over-hyped vintage?

Re: Is '92 the most over-hyped vintage?

Re: Is '92 the most over-hyped vintage?

1985 Warre

Re: Maximilian ?. ?. Wiseman's Headwetting Virtual Offline

Re: Virtual headwetting ”” coming soon

Re: 1977 Graham

1985 Taylor Vintage Port

1963 Offley

Re: 1927 Taylor (originally a mystery bottle)

Re: Type of glass

Re: Stay Me With Flagons: Corrections and Comments

Re: Stay Me With Flagons: Corrections and Comments

Re: Stay Me With Flagons: Corrections and Comments

Stay Me With Flagons: Corrections and Comments

Re: Stay Me With Flagons, by Maurice Healy

Re: Stay Me With Flagons, by Maurice Healy

Re: Stay Me With Flagons, by Maurice Healy

Stay Me With Flagons, by Maurice Healy

Re: Vintagewise: Corrections and Comments

1963 Offley Colheita (bottled 1988)

Re: 1983 Taylor VP

Need recommendations on Belgian beer

1994 Quinta do Passadouro

Re: Hollow tube? How big?

Some Hotel Info

Re: How expensive would be accommodation in the vicinity?

Save the date! Madeira dinner in Chicago on May 10

Clearance on 2003 Quinta do Noval

1978 Krohn Colheita