Vintage Port

Vintage Port is the rarest and most prestigious style of Port, the fortified wine of Portugal's Douro Valley: the wine of a single outstanding harvest that the great houses choose to "declare", bottled young after up to about two and a half years in cask and then matured for decades in the bottle. It is fortified like all Port, with neutral grape spirit added part-way through fermentation to lock in the grape's natural sweetness and raise the strength to around 20 percent alcohol. Made from the finest selection of grapes in only the best years, it is dense, dark and powerfully structured — concentrated blackberry and plum over dark chocolate, violet and grippy tannin, throwing a heavy crust of sediment that demands decanting. Young it is a wall of primary black fruit; with decades in bottle it softens into dried fig, leather and haunting spice, the longest-lived of all Ports. It is a sweet, warming after-dinner wine, poured in small measures alongside blue cheese, dark chocolate, nuts and dried fruit.