Quinta do Crasto’s £5000 Tawny Port and Douro wines rated

£5,000 bottles of wine are usually the preserve of the revered estates of France’s Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne regions (with Napa producers getting a look in now and again), so it’s a bold move for a Portuguese winery to release a wine – albeit a century-old Tawny Port – which retails north of £5k.

The Honore Very Old Tawny Port from Quinta do Crasto is not just very old (it is a blend of wines that were all produced pre-1918) it is also very rare; just 400 bottles were produced, one to represent each year since the Quinta was founded in 1615 and the wine being bottled.Just over a century ago Quinta do Crasto was bought by Constantino de Almeida, founder of the renowned Constantino wine house dedicated to the production and export of Port. It is wines from his private collection, all put into barrel before he purchased the estate in 1918, which make up the blend of the Honore Very Old Tawny Port.

Today the estate is owned and managed by Constantino de Almeida’s granddaughter Leonor Roquette, her husband Jorge Roquette and their children Tomás and Miguel. It was their decision in 2015 to create two one-off wines in honour of the people who have worked on the estate over the 400 years since it was founded.

Alongside the Honore Tawny, Quinta do Crasto released a Douro red wine also named Honore. It is a blend of wines from the 2015 vintage of the Quinta’s top two vineyards Vinha Maria Teresa and Vinha da Ponte. Just 1615 numbered magnums were produced of this hedonistic blend.

What you get for your £5k (as well as the wine)

You cannot release a wine like the Honore Very Old Tawny Port (priced £5,103) without going to town on the packaging, and no corners have been cut here. The wine comes in a numbered hand-blown crystal decanter housed within a walnut box, emboldened with hand-sewn leather and sterling silver (pictured top).

The Honore Douro red – retail price £783 – comes in a numbered gatefold-boxed Magnum, complete with coffee-table book.

Speaking about Quinta do Crasto’s premium vision at a recent tasting in London to launch the Honore wines Miguel Roquette said: ‘We want Vinha Maria Teresa to be Portugal’s DRC,’ which is ambitious for an estate which can document its history of Port production back to 1615, but produced its first Douro wines in 1994.

Other ‘iconic’ Douro wines from the Quinta were on show at the tasting, including the Vinha Maria Teresa and Vinha da Ponte wines which come from steep stone-terraced vineyards on a dramatic spur overlooking the Douro river.

Around 50 different grape varieties contribute complexity and balance to these field blend parcels which are only made in exceptional years. Both wines enjoy ‘grand cru’ status in the Douro and are consistently of the highest quality and eminently age-worthy; their reputation is deserved.

All the latest 2016 releases hail from a generally declared year for vintage Ports, feted for remarkable freshness and fruit purity. So it is for the wines, notwithstanding the customary heady concentration of Maria Teresa and Ponte, a function of old field blend parcels originally planted for Port.

In this refined vintage, winemaker Manuel Lobo achieved the requisite level of elegance to produce Crasto’s first Touriga Franca – a grape that he describes as ‘sometimes a bit rustic’. More finely framed, both it and Crasto’s single-varietal Tinta Roriz (aka Spain’s Tempranillo) and Touriga Nacional come from higher, younger vineyards planted with wine in mind by Roquette’s father, Jorge.

Tasting the Quinta do Crasto Honore and 2016 wines: