2016 Valriz

Tasting notes for individual Ports, with an index sorted by vintage and alphabetically.
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Tasting notes for individual Ports, with an index sorted by vintage and alphabetically.
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Altrurian
Cheap Ruby
Posts: 10
Joined: 11:11 Tue 30 Mar 2021
Location: Porto, Portugal

2016 Valriz

Post by Altrurian »

Purchased for something less than €40 from the store at R. Fernandes Tomás 145 in Porto, across the street from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

My project of sampling vintage ports from Porto’s neighborhood grocers continues.

I took a few sips from this bottle immediately after decanting, just to establish a baseline, and was struck, but not thoroughly repelled, by the wine’s astringency. Five hours later, things had calmed noticeably. On the lemons-to-dates spectrum the taste was on the acidic side of melon, with a pretty sharp alcoholic vaprousness. The next day, approaching the twenty-four-hour mark, the fruits evoked were rather darker, but the burn was still keeping the wine well this side of mellow.

I consider this pepperiness an asset on the whole. At this stage of my port education, I attribute much of what I would call a wine’s “character” to the interesting after-effect of heat on the lips and hard palate.

Now, on the third day, the wine is more stolid, predictable, and less volatile—all this while not lapsing into insipidness. Throughout, it has struck me as admirably viscous, with attractive sheets and lasting streaks of purple on the glass handsomely complementing the 80% opacity of the corpus. On the whole, I’m pleased that so entertaining and respectable a libation can be had at so modest a price.

I should acknowledge that this wine, bottled in 2018, had, by all available evidence, spent numerous months in the shop’s north-facing front window, albeit (at least at the time of purchase) in its box. This was one of those unusual cases in which no bottles sporting this window-displayed label were offered on the establishment’s interior shelves.
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JacobH
Quinta do Vesuvio 1994
Posts: 3300
Joined: 16:37 Sat 03 May 2008
Location: London, UK
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Re: 2016 Valriz

Post by JacobH »

The only Valriz I have tried was its 40-year-old tawny which was very nice. It’s very hard to find anything out about them online. The company is “Coimbra de Mattos” with an address in Galafura which is just under half-way between Reguá and Pinhão on the North Bank, before Quinta do Crasto. They also make some Ports & wines under the names of Quinta da Laceira & Quinta dos Mattos. I don’t think I’ve seen either of those for sale.
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