For The Love Of Port

Passing the Lea & Sanderman office in St James' St, SW1 on the way to Berry Brothers this afternoon and low & behold I was gobsmacked at the sight of a bottle of 2003 Quinta do Noval & 2003 Quinta do Noval Nacional (+4 other 2003’s) in their window in bright sunshine & with reasonable heat!!!! How could such a reputable merchant do such a thing? Just beggars belief… what a waste.

Wow I'll pray for these bottles tonight!

Last year I was also shocked to see 3 bottles of Batuta 2000 in a Portugal wine merchant window. It is already hard to find some on the local market, when you find some it is already cooked :?

Hopefully it was a dummy bottle, just to tantalize.

While in Lisbon and also Oporto, I am always amazed that almost all bottles of Port are standing up in a bunch of the shops. Many older bottles, in Lisbon shops exist and are also directly in the sunlight in close proximity to or directly in the windows. What is up with that? I guess that the display does bring bottles in and they figure they only will waste one of these. I hope for their sake, they carefully removed the cork drank the wine, put a T cork back in the bottle and added it back to the display after at least enjoying the contents. Who knows though.

I too am shocked by the expensive bottles in the windows of shops in Lisbon, Porto and Sintra. One of the better shops I've been to is Napoleao in Lisbon (Rua dos Fanqueiros, I believe)... nice selection, but the prices are a bit high and the staff a bit pushy.

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Marco DeFreitas

I spotted these as well...only it was at J&B, and the bottles were magnums...I'm pretty sure they were dummies (AFAIK, Nacional has never bottled in magnum).