Port Evening and Rankings

We had a delightful evening sampling some lovely and interesting ports, in spite of our guest speaker's description of a previous tasting of one of the ports as 'baby's vomit'. Ooooh, yuck! Fortunately, no one found a bouquet of that description on any of the wines! Alan Gardner told us to look for 'grip' of the wines in our mouth and described how the production of Port changed around 1986 when Portugal joined the EEC. He also thought we'd find the Colheita Port (not a vintage port) different from the rest. It certainly was. Colheita ports are tawney wines aged in cask as opposed to barrel aged. This was the run-away favourite of the group which placed it at the top of their list; Alan liked it too, placing it as his 2nd favourite of the evening. Combined with appetizers of various types of cheeses, sweet and savoury pastries, walnuts, chocolate covered strawberries and dense chocolate brownies, we had a very enjoyable evening. Here's how the wines were ranked. They were poured in age order from oldest to youngest.

Thank you to Alan Gardner for making our evening successful and enjoyable!

Name of Wine (in order poured)	Group Ranking	Guest Ranking
A. 1978 Hutcheson Colheita Port	1	2
B. 1980 Gould Campbell Vintage Port	3	8
C. 1983 Quarles Harris Vintage Port	7	4
D. 1985 Warre's Vintage Port	4	3
E. 1991 Warre's Vintage Port	8	5
F. 1994 Warre's Vintage Port	5	7
G. 1997 Smith Woodhouse Vintage Port	2	6
H. 2000 Delaforce Vintage Port 2000	6	1