1972 Quevedo Colheita (bottled 2024)

[winesecretary]

From 90ml

P’n’P

Brown rather than red, yellow rim

Dark muscovado nose, salted caramel at back end

Palate has lots of of fig and poached apricot and a little prune late but mainly splendid (excessive for some?) levels of acidity.

Finished fairly dry. That’s the acidity again.

I like this rather a lot. It’s very good Madeira, if that makes sense.

[Alex Bridgeman]

I liked this wine from the advent calendar so much I bought some 75cl bottles. It is very good.

[Mike J. W.]

I'm starting to think their style is to make Madeira like Ports. I had their 1992 Colheita back in December and last night opened their 20 year-old Tawny. Both were dry and had high acidity and have some other aspects of a Madeira Bual. A tasting note will follow in a day or two.

[Glenn E.]

One of the things that I noticed while tasting my way through the 2024 Advent Calendar (which is where I assume this bottle came from) is that the Ports therein tasted very different than the same Port bottled normally. Sometimes radically different.

This one and the VOO White (Grandpa's cask) were the only ones that tasted "normal" to me, and yes this one was very good!

[winesecretary]

@ Glenn - yes. A number in the pack were puzzlingly disappointing. You report on what’s in front of you but you can’t help wondering whether or not it is representative of the same wine in a different format.

A friend of mine once did a half bottle - bottle - magnum tasting of a range of the same wines ( a champagne house, a claret, musar, a port as I recall). They weren’t close. Some were not really identifiable as the same wine from one size to the other. Qualitatively magnum outperformed the others on all options.

[Glenn E.]

We just accidentally had a similar comparison, with both a 375 ml and a 750 ml of 1983 Graham showing up (double blind) at the same Port Club.

Interestingly, on this occasion the 375 ml was decidedly younger than the 750. Everyone agreed, with the assumed age difference ranging from 2 years to 14 years. They were sufficiently different that only 2 people even guessed that they were the same shipper. One person thought they might be an '83 and an '85 Fonseca, which is pretty significant given the usual youthfulness of F85. The 750 was mine so I knew it was a 1983 Graham. I thought the 375 was a Graham and about 10 years younger, but 1994 didn't seem correct so I instead guessed that it was a 1997. Yeah, I pushed to 1997 rather than falling back to 1991. It really felt younger than the 750.

I have had a few experiences where a magnum was clearly more youthful than a 750, and also a few where a bottle was more youthful than a 375. This was the first time that the smaller bottle seemed less aged, so I think it was an anomaly due to bottle variation.

[Andy Velebil]

IIRC, the Advent calendar bottles are, or at least were, all hand bottled. So there can be some bottle variation compared to larger bottles done on a mechanical bottling line.

If all things are constant, the larger the bottle the slower the aging process. However, if things aren’t constant that could significantly alter which size format shows younger/better.

[Alex Bridgeman]

IIRC, the Advent calendar bottles are, or at least were, all hand bottled. So there can be some bottle variation compared to larger bottles done on a mechanical bottling line.

They are still hand-filled. The bottling line in the new winery is fascinating to watch — and then on a bench in the corner of the room you see the filling machine for the 9cl and 5cl bottles. Maybe not hand-filled in the proper historic sense, but certainly far more semi-automated than the 37.5, 75 and 150cl bottles.