Quinta do Vallado Tawny 10 Year Old Porto (50cl)
£21.25
The wine
Rich and velvety, with complex notes of dried fruit, praline, orange confit and nuances of tobacco through to a long, harmoniously balanced and complex finish. The 50cl bottle is the traditional format for aged tawny.
Tawny ages in small oak casks called pipes, where slow oxidation strips the colour to amber and builds nut, dried fruit and orange peel. The ten-year designation is an average age of the blend rather than a minimum. Unlike Vintage Port it is ready on release and keeps for weeks once opened, and it is excellent lightly chilled.
The producer
Quinta do Vallado
View all Quinta do Vallado winesQuinta do Vallado was established in 1716 and is among the oldest and most famous estates in the Douro, sitting on the banks of the River Corgo near Peso da Régua.
It was once the property of Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira, the most significant figure in the history of Portuguese wine. Widowed young in the nineteenth century, she ran and expanded a vast Douro empire, replanted after phylloxera devastated the valley, and became a national figure; the estate remains in the hands of her descendants five generations on.
The Douro is the world's oldest demarcated wine region, mapped in 1756, and its vineyards are cut into terraces on schist hillsides steep enough to make mechanisation impossible across much of the valley. Vallado make Port and table wine side by side and take both equally seriously, which was not always true here: for centuries the best fruit went to Port and dry table wine was an afterthought. That changed from the 1990s, and estates like this one led it.
