Quinta do Vallado Tawny 20 Year Old Porto (50cl)
£32.95
The wine
An extremely rich but beautifully balanced twenty-year-old Tawny, delivering dried fruits and nuances of cigar. Fresh and unctuous, with a touch of liquorice through to a satin-smooth finish.
Twenty-year tawny is often held to be the sweet spot of the category: old enough for real complexity, young enough to keep fruit alongside the nut and cigar-box character. The age is an average of the blend, assembled by the cellar master to a consistent house style rather than drawn from one harvest.
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.
