Taylor’s 1964 and 1965 Very Old Single Harvest
Port

Taylor’s 1965
and 1964 Very Old Single Harvest
Ports are a half-century old but the 1965 was just released and the 1964 is
still available on retail shelves. If you’re looking for a 50th-birthday
gift for a relative, friend or business associate born in 1965—a year that was
literally a washout for claret and red Burgundy—you probably can’t do much
better than the newest release from Taylor.

Taylor has one of the deepest reserves of very
old cask-aged Ports and launched this new project beginning with the 1964 in
January of 2014. These are rare ports from a single harvest that are aged in
casks until being bottled and released. The decades of aging in wood have
resulted in an essence of port through controlled oxidation and steady
evaporation that has concentrated the wine.

One of the reasons I find these two
wines so fascinating is that they have very different profiles—unlike, say,
Taylor’s 40-year-old tawny, which is a blend of vintages made to maintain a
consistent house style.<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1423498166573-IMAG0051+-+Copy.jpg"> 

I give the 1964 Very Old Single Harvest Port the edge today over the 1965, as
it’s closer to my paradigm of great tawny port, but the ‘65 is equally distinctive,
and perhaps younger. With a green-edged old mahogany color, the ‘64 offers
ineffable scents of almond, brown spices, mocha, cedar and medicinal herbs
lifted by a high-pitched note of orange peel. It’s at once glyceral-rich and
brisk in the mouth, with a firm edge of acidity giving real bite and lift to
the superripe flavors of mocha, toffee, molasses and citrus zest. This port is
carrying a relatively high 21% alcohol as well as 112 grams per liter of
residual sugar and rather low acidity, but the wine’s plush, extremely long
finish displays serious energy and grip. 95

The 1965, a degree lower in alcohol, is a tad darker (amber-mahogany)
but less lucid in color, offering scents of marzipan, cinnamon, fig, and caramel,
with a surprisingly fresh note of cherry emerging with aeration. The wine is
more youthful and primary in the mouth than the ‘64, more powerful today for
all its silkiness.It’s technically much higher in residual sugar AND in acidity
than the 1964 and a bit more aggressively youthful. Today it’s a less mellow,
slightly more peppery drink and yet there’s already a wonderfully silky texture
and a slowly mounting whiplash of a finish. These wines are meant to be ready
to drink upon release, but I certainly wouldn’t be in a rush to uncork the
1965. 93+

There are two great advantages to very old
wood-aged ports. First, they have aged forever in barrel, with multiple
rackings, so when they’re bottled they leave their sediment behind in the cask.
You can just uncork and pour them, unlike with a (bottle-aged) vintage Port
that has thrown a huge deposit in the bottle and requires careful decanting.
And because these old tawnies have essentially been exposed to controlled
oxidation and seasoned barrels for 50 years, they’re hard to kill. Once you
open a bottle, it should remain fresh—indeed, show increasing nuance—for at
least a couple weeks in a refrigerator, if not more. My bottles were
considerably more complex the next day, but they were so seductive I could not
make them last longer than a week, even in the name of science

You can serve great old tawnies with
nuts or a nut tart or crème brûlée
after a meal, but I prefer drinking them on their own, slightly chilled, with
good company.

These
wines are officially priced at close to $300, but I’ve seen them listed for as
little as $250.

--Stephen Tanzer

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