jdaw1 wrote:The “Récolte 1958” (= Harvest 1958) is strangely ill-fitting to some of the other words on the bottles.
Agree. I don’t think I’ve seen something labeled very old/old and then have a year on a neck tag as well from back then. But weirder things have happened.
No Selo’s as well.
Regardless, seem to be more basic ports. Perhaps what would be a Reserve Ruby/Tawny today?
Delinquent wrote: ↑06:20 Wed 02 Feb 2022
They lived in france, so thats might be the reason.
I believe Julian refers not to the fact that it is in French, but rather to the fact that at least 3 of those bottles look like types of Port that would not normally be year-dated.
The Special White, Finest Old White, and Finest Old Ruby sound like entry-level Ports to me, and so would not be year-dated. I'm not familiar with how Vintage Character Ports were normally labeled, so that's the one that I'm not sure about. But I suspect that they were also not normally year-dated.
Glenn E. wrote: ↑19:04 Wed 02 Feb 2022I believe Julian refers not to the fact that it is in French, but rather to the fact that at least 3 of those bottles look like types of Port that would not normally be year-dated.
I've opened a bottle of the Special White. It had a regular corck, no stopper.
It is still very enjoyable to drink, it has a nice elegant hazelnut nose, in the mouth as well alongside with plum and cinamon.
Let's see how it improves (or not) in the next days.
Thank you for posting this. As I seem to be mentioning very frequently at the moment, I find these old non-Vintage Ports really interesting. It is such a pity that we don’t know exactly what these Ports are. Although it must have been pretty good to be enjoyable after 65ish years in a bottle!
How sweet is it? I’m trying to work out whether the description of “dry” you see on older adverts for Port (including ruby Ports) actually means “dry” in the modern sense or something else.
It isn't very sweet I must say - way less than i would have expected from a white Port.
Now after beeing open for a while it got even better. Walnut now, fresh an citrus with very nice plum. I must say I relly enjoy it.
But dry as I know it from some old wood-driven Whiskies or Champagnes it is not - not at all.
Yesterday I've opened another bottle of these old ones. I picked one who had lost quite a bit - so I was wondering if it is still good.
After the removal of the cap I saw that the cork has fallen into the bottle... no good sign. I don't know how long ago that happend...
So I poured a glass, and hey it is still good... I'll try it again and post some notes.
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Delinquent wrote:Yesterday I've opened another bottle of these old ones. I picked one who had lost quite a bit - so I was wondering if it is still good.
After the removal of the cap I saw that the cork has fallen into the bottle... no good sign. I don't know how long ago that happend...
So I poured a glass, and hey it is still good... I'll try it again and post some notes.
20220214_154103090_iOS.jpg
20220214_154109259_iOS.jpg
Nice! Crazy how a cork can fall in and still be good. Guess those old capsules really sealed.
6x Fonseca 1985 (0 points for originality!)
And 3x Vesuvio 1996 magnums (fun!) that I wasn’t looking for but popped up for what seemed a good price. I was never lucky enough to be given any birth year port either so thought that I might as well do it myself!
With thanks to all who posted on my thread a few days ago but In particular to Glenn and Akzy who inspired the above.
I’ve had a bit of a search on this but couldn’t find any directly relevant threads - is there a vague rule of thumb about the effect that bottle size has on port ageing, beyond just ‘bigger = slower’? Will it follow there or thereabouts the same patterns/rates as dry red wine?
@ Jamiesan12o - Hello! Magnums tend to mature about 50% slower than bottles in my experience, no matter what is in them (wine/madeira/port/sherry). In bottle terms the usual rule is 21 years from vintage as a starting point. So magnums 32. Your Vesuvio 96 is now 26. But 96 is a minor vintage so perhaps earlier drinking. So maybe think about cracking one open in a couple of years, but be prepared to wait for the other two.