Tawny Port

Tawny Port is the barrel-aged, oxidative style of Port: a sweet fortified wine from the steep terraces of Portugal's Douro Valley, left for years in seasoned oak casks where slow contact with air fades its youthful red to a glowing amber-brown and trades fresh fruit for nutty, caramelised complexity. It is made like all Port by adding neutral grape spirit part-way through fermentation, which halts the yeast and locks abundant grape sugar into a wine of roughly 19 to 20 percent alcohol. On the nose and palate it is all toffee, caramel, dried fig, raisin, candied orange peel and roasted walnut, silky and warming rather than fiery. The finest are sold with an age statement — 10, 20, 30 or 40 years — while the single-vintage Colheita is dated from one named harvest. Fully mature and clarified in cask, it needs no decanting and is drunk, often lightly chilled, as an aperitif or at the end of a meal.