First taste: Taylor’s Single Harvest 1970 Port

Taylor’s secured a remarkable collection of old, cask-aged Ports when it purchased Wiese & Krohn in 2013. A year later Taylor’s launched its first Single Harvest Port (an aged tawny Port, also known as a colheita) from the 1964 vintage. The newly released 1970 is the seventh in the series of this limited edition of 50-year-old wines.

The year 1970 happened to be an excellent and widely declared Port vintage producing classic, tight-knit wines, the best of which still have a long future ahead. Vintage Ports are bottled after around two years, but for colheitas, prolonged ageing in pipes (casks of around 620 litres) gives a very different outcome from bottle age.

Keeping Port in wood for this long is an extraordinary feat involving continual care and attention to ensure the wine does not expend itself. Cool cellars are essential: this Single Harvest 1970 was aged in the Port lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia. (In contrast, wines aged in the Douro Valley often take an overtly stewed, volatile character known as ‘Douro bake’.)

After nearly half a century in wood, the wine takes on a wonderfully lifted, liquorous quality, the natural sweetness intensified by the steady evaporation rate of 1-2% a year. The key to maintaining the quality of the wine is to keep topping up the cask with more of the same wine to prevent the oxidation from becoming excessive.

The result is a rich, heady wine with tawny qualities, the tannins having softened and fallen away. Don’t expect to find primary fruit, but instead all sorts of ethereal complexities that have gathered with age.

One of the great beauties of these wines is that you don’t have to consume the bottle at a single sitting. The fact that it has aged for so long in the presence of air means that it is resistant to oxidation when ullage occurs after pouring. Kept cool, a wine like this may be sampled at intervals over a few weeks without its very many charms diminishing greatly.

Tasting Taylor’s Single Harvest 1970

See also:

Decanter’s guide to anniversary wines 2020

Port 2018 declared for rare third consecutive year