Graham's 20 Year Tawny Porto

Ah, beautiful port. We really enjoy drinking port. If you don't know much about port, this is a fortified, sweet wine that comes from Portugal. They start fermenting their wine like any other, and then partway through the process, they add a grape spirit (something called aguardente, like a grape brandy) to kill the yeast and stop the fermentation early. This leaves sugar still in the wine, and it makes it sweet!

Often, sweet wines will have less alcohol. Why? Because alcohol comes from yeast eating the sugar in the juice and creating alcohol, and if you stop this process early, you leave more sugar and make your wine sweeter, but you also make less alcohol. With port, however, you do stop the process early, but you're also adding more alcohol with your aguardente. The result: fortified wine, with a high sugar content but also a higher alcohol content.

Port is delicious. Before Katie liked drinking wine, she liked drinking port. Fortified wines like port are different from sweet wines, as that extra alcohol gives it a little more of a bite and keeps it from tasting like syrup. Port comes in many different varieties, and we won't get into all of that here, but we shared a bottle of port during a family game night recently (darn you, Oregon Trail card game, we will never win!), and we wanted to share it with you!

We present:

Graham's 20 Year Tawny Porto

This was a birthday present from Katie's aunt, and a night when the family was all together again seemed like a great occasion to open it. This port was delightful. It reminded us of the caramelized top of crème brulee, and the fancy kind of maple syrup from Vermont, and fresh honey. There's also some vanilla in there, like vanilla beans. This smells great, but you're going to feel the heat from the alcohol even in your nose. The ABV in this is 20%, in case you're wondering. But port is a sipping wine, a dessert wine for after dinner, and you typically don't drink a whole glass like you would with a regular still wine.

This wine is beautiful on its own for dessert, though it can also pair with dessert if you'd like--just be aware, you should make sure that the wine is sweeter than the food, or it's going to give your wine something of a bitter edge. Port is also classically paired with cheese (the most well-known pairing is port and Stilton cheese).

Tawny ports like this one have ages on the bottle: 10 year, 20 year, 40 year, etc. These ages are a little confusing, because with port, that age simply means that the port you're getting has the characteristics of a port wine aged that long in a barrel. But in general, you'll find that 10 year tawny ports aren't as smooth, and the ports get smoother as the ages get higher. The price also goes up significantly. We really enjoy all ages of port, but most people will say (and we generally will, too) that 20 year is the best. It's just the right amount of smoothness--beyond that, they almost get TOO smooth, and you lose some of what you love about port. But we have had some really fantastic 40 year tawny ports.

Port is wonderful. If you haven't given it a try yet, we really think you should! As we mentioned, it's a sipping wine. The good news is that an opened bottle of tawny port can last up to 2 months (though we don't think we've ever tested that fully).

This sells for $63 at Jacob Liquor. If you're wanting to dip your toes in port and not spend quite as much, the Graham's 10 year tawny port sells for $37.