Sometimes Your First Love Is Your Best Love

I’ve always had this love affair with Port wine, the kind of affair that inspires poets like Pablo Neruda to spend their days by the sea, pining for a love just out of reach.  Not to put too romantic a spin on it, but I am head-over-heels for port.  You see, in another lifetime, as a restaurant manager years ago, I got to try Dow’s 1977 Vintage Port, a Wine Spectator 100-pointer, that could be argued to be one of the greatest ports from one of the greatest vintages EVER.  A bold statement, perhaps, but this is how I was ruined right out of the gate.

It always resonates in the back of my mind, whenever I meet with reps who just so happened to have Port in their bag.  And I’ve had some ridiculously good ports in my day, yet never as good as that happenstance chance to taste a Dow’s 1977 while working a lunch at a small restaurant in Downtown Dayton, Ohio.  So rumbling in the back part of my brain pan was this thought as my good friend and Vintner Select rep Lauren Wiethe dropped in with Harvey Roberts, the global sales rep for Kopke, a spectacular producer in Portugal.  Harvey has a great way about discussing Port wine in general, and specifically, those of Kopke.

The lineup was pretty cool, made cooler by the fact he was hauling around a 1966 Colheita:

• Kopke Dry White Port NV.
• Kopke Late Bottled Vintage 2011
• Kopke 10 Year Tawny Port
• Kopke 20 Year Tawny Port
• Kopke Colheita 1996
• Kopke Colheita 1966

The thing about white port is it’s fairly misunderstood by consumers, and while the residual sugar is relatively high, (usually) it’s still a dry white that makes for a great, refreshing aperitif.  The Kopke Dry White Port NV is pretty darn delicious.

To backstep a bit, for those that don’t quite understand port, there are two BASIC types (forget about LBV, Colheita, Vintage and all that for the moment):  Ruby and Tawny port.  What the major difference is, is aging.  Ruby port is very young, with less than 4 years in oak, which allows the wine to retain the color of the grapes, thus showing a purple/ruby color and red and black berry fruit flavors.  Tawny Port on the other hand, sees 4 years or longer in oak, losing the color of the fruit and leaching in the pigmentation of the wood, thus gaining brownish or tawny color and more elements of toasted nuts, toffee, caramel and so on.

The Kopke 10 Year Tawny is a wine I could pretty much drink all day every day, living in some coastal Maine town, writing my next novel while a fire roars in the fireplace nearby, and a glass of Kopke Tawny close at hand – yeah, that’s living y’all.  The Kopke 20 Year Tawny is sort of that aforementioned vision amplified times 10.  These two are simply gorgeous wines, like a scene straight out of Willa Wonka.

Now the concept of Late Bottled Vintage is complicated, but not complicated.  It should by definition be simple enough:  a ruby port from a single vintage year, of the highest quality, and bottled after aging 4 to 6 years in oak casks.  Yet it has been marketed in such a way that consumers heads here in the U.S. are perpetually spinning by its mere mentioning.  The Kopke LBV 2011 is a gorgeous blend of standards like Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz and Sousão, and reveals a sublime confection of cherries, currants and cocoa.  Like the seminal pop band The Tubes used to sing, “She’s a Beauty.”

Colheita, pronounced Col-yate-ah, is a single-vintage Tawny port.  And Harvey had two to taste, the Kopke Colheita 1996 and the Kopke Colheita 1966 (the year in which I was born).  Time is certainly not on my side when I am tasting these at work, I will tell you that much.  These are wines to be savored, not hurried through, yet the effect is immediate, and lingering.  While the 1996 was impressive, my soul seemed intently gravitating to the 1966.  A parallel life in a glass, if you think about it.  Mesmerizing to taste this wine, even in such an infinitesimal moment such as this.  I only wished I could have taken the rest of the day off (just kidding, Ed and Todd).
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It is at moments like this, I am thankful for my job, and thankful for the opportunities to try wines such as these.  I try to make wine a bit less of an elitism, like many folks still believe it to be.  Yet it seems the geek flag is always flying high, and the poet in me sees the wine through a grape-stained prism, and the world is electrified with more passion, more beauty and more wonder than can be contained.
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