40 Year Old Tawny Port by Kopke

[Gerwin de Graaf]

Won at auction. Kinda special given the fact that this one was bottled in 1980 (so this has got some serious bottle ageing as well). I was hoping for the best of course (this bottle was the worst looking one from the lot, seemed to have suffered quite some seepage) .

Again this TN is from memory, so forgive the somewhat vague descriptions please .

I opened (and decanted) the bottle on 10/28/2011 (day before the dinner where it was to be served (same dinner that I brought the 1970 Borges VP to).
At first taste (to check if it was still drinkable) from a small -just-to-try-glass I knew that it was going to be something special. It directly gave a fabulous boost of concentrated deep jammy fruits (apricot, very sweet melon) and almonds and walnuts in the nose as wel as on the palate. Although at this time it also had quite a lot of heat from the alcohol so the finish was not fantastic.

The alcohol however seemed to have integrated in the wine overnight very well because the heat seemed to be gone once we started on it the following day (also after that dinner) And what a Tawny it turned out to be!!
Beautiful color, fiercely deep shining orange in the center, fading to a more brownish orange to the rim.
On the nose, as it was the day before lots and lots of 'candied' (is this a word in English? ) tropical fruit, hazelnuts, walnuts and roasted almonds. Thesame flavours came forward on the palate, with also some peppery spices (did the alcoholis heat turn into this?). And for the finish? That truly delivered the stuff that I would expect from this kind of Tawny (I have close to no experience with 40-yo tawnies). It seemed to last forever, and held firmly for well over a minute!

In my opinion, this one even kind of blew away the 1970 VP we also had (this of course could have something to do with the order of serving both Ports).

A nice other detail perhaps. It is obvious that these Tawnies are not made for long cellaring, given the fact that the (thankfully driven, not t-stopper) cork was quite short. I tried to pull it out with my corkscrew, but by the little pressure that I applied to get in the corkscrew, the whole cork just slid into the bottle (it must have been soaked all the way through.

[Roy Hersh]

Excellent juice, funny thing, I put a photo of this on the FOR THE LOVE OF PORT facebook page, yesterday.

[Eric Ifune]

I think you did the right thing in decanting the day before since it had been in bottle so long.