Barros 20 Year Old Tawny Port
£44.75
The wine
Delicate orange in colour with a greenish rim. On the nose a rich and complex combination of dried fruits, spices and subtle hints of wood. Elegant, well structured and full bodied, with a long and engaging finish.
Twenty-year tawny is widely held to be the sweet spot of the category, old enough for real complexity but still carrying fruit alongside the nut and dried-orange character. The age is an average of the blend rather than a minimum, assembled by the cellar master to a consistent house profile year after year.
The producer
Barros
View all Barros winesBarros was founded in 1913 by Manoel de Almeida and José Barros, and celebrated its centenary a little over a decade ago. It sits among the most prestigious of the Port houses, and its reputation rests on one style in particular.
Colheita is Port from a single declared year, aged in cask rather than bottle for a minimum of seven years and frequently for far longer. It is the most demanding of the tawny styles, because a single vintage must carry the wine alone through decades of slow oxidation without the safety net of blending. Barros keep theirs in wood well beyond the legal minimum, and the house holds one of the deepest reserves of old Colheita in the Douro.
The lodges are at Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto, where Port has been aged since the eighteenth century because the cool damp air off the Atlantic suits long cask maturation far better than the fierce heat of the Douro valley itself. Ruby, White, LBV, Vintage and both tawny ages complete the range.
