Cockburn Cellar, VNG

[Derek T.]

Uncle Tom and I were honoured to be allowed into the inner sanctum of the Cockburn lodge in VNG last weekend. With the possible exception of Niepoort, this is the most interesting old cellar I have been in. There are some real old gems in there with small stocks of many unreleased vintages and very old vintages.

I have uploaded lots of pictures to the PORTraits section. Here are a few as a taster:

[Jay Powers]

Very cool Did you get to try one of those 55's (or '31)?

I just got a few Cockburn '55's for a decent price (I think, certainly the lowest I've ever seen them). Looking to taste one in Porto if I get the chance!

Jay

[Roy Hersh]

It really is one of the coolest old cellars although for sheer old Port insanity, Ferreira is also pretty amazing.

[Derek T.]

Very cool Did you get to try one of those 55's (or '31)?

Unfortunately not. But it was such a great experience just to see the bottles and to know that they are making a serious effort to maintain these small stocks of the older wines for future generations to see, and possibly drink. Some of the old bottles have actually been bought back from merchants who failed to sell them.

[Tom Archer]

It was certainly a treat to see that cellar.

We were shown round by Coralia Tavares who has worked for Cockburn for over 30 years, and clearly guards it very carefully.

She explained that they currently have a moratorium on opening any bottle of which fewer than a dozen remain, so attempts to extract some of the rarer gems are likely to prove futile.

The cellar had some significant stashes of bottles from undeclared years (for Cockburn), most notably the 1977, but also what appeared to be 1971's (unless it was a badly chalked '77..)

If they are '71's it would be interesting to sample a bottle, as I know of no other '71 VP's in existence.

Tom