VINTAGE
2003
COUNTRY
Portugal
TABLE #
6362
REGION
Douro Valley
94
This is lovely, displaying warm date, toffee and persimmon notes entwined with sesame oil, green tea and ginger flavors. Shows a lovely interplay of sweet and dry, with flashes of hazelnut cream and juniper contrasting each other on the long and deep finish. Drink now. 900 cases made, 475 cases imported.
This superb example of aged tawny Porto is made from selected grapes from the best vineyards of the Cima Corgo and Douro Superior. Taylor Fladgate is an area leader in winemaking technology, as one of only three Porto producers to pioneer the development of piston fermenter techniques, called Port Toes, that extract significantly greater flavor and aroma than conventional pump-over fermentation. Fermentation is halted by the addition of grape spirits before all the residual sugar has been fermented, creating a sweet, fortified wine. Individual wines produced in different vintages are aged in 600-liter oak casks for years, over which time they will lose their young, dark purple-black color to gain the distinctive “tawny” hue from which the wine takes its name. As tawnies age, the wines take on increasingly more nutty flavors and become more concentrated as the barrels lose 3% of their volume every year (the “Angels’ Share”) to evaporation. The 30 Year Old Tawny is a blend created using tawnies with an average of 30 years of aging.