Types of Port Wine

Every Port takes one of two routes. Ruby styles are shielded from air and do their maturing in glass; Tawny styles are left in wood for years until the colour fades to amber and the fruit turns to caramel and walnut. Pick the family, and the tier inside it is straightforward.

All of them are fortified the same way — grape spirit added part-way through fermentation, which kills the yeast, keeps the unfermented sugar and lands the wine at 19–22% alcohol. What separates the cheapest bottle from the dearest is not the method but what happened afterwards.

The fork: glass or wood

A Ruby-family Port sits in large sealed vats where almost no air reaches it, keeping the colour deep and the fruit fresh, then finishes its life in bottle. A Tawny-family Port is deliberately exposed, resting in small casks in the lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia in northern Portugal while it slowly oxidises.

The practical consequence is what happens after you pull the cork. A Tawny has already met all the air it will ever need and stays good for weeks. A Vintage has met none, and falls apart within days.

What the number on a Tawny really means

The Tawny tiers are where the classification quietly misleads. A 20 Year Old Tawny is not a blend averaging twenty years, and no component has to be twenty years old. The figure is an indication of age: the IVDP's tasting panel judges that the blend has the character of a twenty-year-old Port, and that judgement is the qualification.

In practice good houses blend well above the stated figure, and the categories do taste reliably different — 10 is nutty and still fruity, 20 adds dried fig and orange peel, 40 goes almost into treacle. Ten, 20, 30 and 40 are the long-established rungs; a 50 Year Old has since been added above them.

Every style and what the rules demand

Vintage is declared only when a house judges the year exceptional, which works out at roughly three times a decade. It is also a decision each shipper takes alone, so a “declared” year is really a year most of the big houses agreed on — 2016 and 2017, unusually, were both declared.

What to buy, and what to skip

The 10 Year Old Tawny is the best bottle on the whole Port list, and it is not close. It costs about what a decent red Douro table wine costs, needs no decanting, and lives in the fridge for a month once open — serve it at 14–16 °C (57–61 °F). LBV is the everyday Ruby; Crusted, if you can find it, gives most of the Vintage experience for a third of the money.

What to skip: buying a Vintage Port as a birthday-year gift without checking the year. Most years were never declared, so for a great many birthdays the wine does not exist — and where it does, drinking it the same week wastes a bottle built to sit for thirty years. A Colheita solves this properly: single-harvest Tawnies are made every year and are ready when you buy them.

Pour small measures either way: this is the strongest wine most people ever drink.