Van Zellers & Co VZ 20 Years Old Tawny Port
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James
Suckling -
Wine &
Spirits -
Wine
Enthusiast -
Robert
Parker
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
A blend of old Ports with an average of 20 years. Aged in very old wooden casks, this exquisite Port is bottled on-demand, allowing it to continue to age and become more complex through its natural evolution with time. This Port is spicy and nutty, with orange flower aromas, figgy ripeness and a silky, honey finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Dried cherry, iodine and peat with some watermelon. Hints of toffee and bark. Medium-to full-bodied, sweet and layered with a tannin texture and rich finish. Tangy and focused.
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Wine & Spirits
Laden with fruit, from pear and kumquat to peach, this wine’s amber lightness offers quiet luxury. The fruit shades from gold and yellow and red, its texture both luscious and muscular, a cool impression lasting to draw you back for another taste. A Tawny to drink long into the night.
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Wine Enthusiast
Poised between fruit and wonderful old gold wood-aging flavors, the wine is rich and relatively sweet. Its dried fruit flavors are balanced by the wine's intense spice and acidity that comes from wood aging.
Editors' Choice. -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The NV 20 Years Old Tawny Port is a field blend from vines averaging 35 years in age. It was bottled in November 2019 with 105 grams of residual sugar and a long cork. Far more generous and expressive than the 10 Year Tawny, this 20 Year excels in its category. The juicy finish is chock-full of flavor, fruit and sugar. The acidity makes it seem fresh and lively. It tastes great, and it is simply irresistible. There is a hint of brandy on the finish, but that does not dominate the wine. The wine, in fact, is very complex for its age, and it has the freshness to counter the spirits. The acidity cuts through everything.
Port is a sweet, fortified wine with numerous styles: Ruby, Tawny, Vintage, Late Bottled Vintage (LBV), White, Colheita, and a few unusual others. It is blended from from the most important red grapes of the Douro Valley, based primarily on Touriga Nacional with over 80 other varieties approved for use. Most Ports are best served slightly chilled at around 55-65°F.
The home of Port—perhaps the most internationally acclaimed beverage—the Douro region of Portugal is one of the world’s oldest delimited wine regions, established in 1756. The vineyards of the Douro, set on the slopes surrounding the Douro River (known as the Duero in Spain), are incredibly steep, necessitating the use of terracing and thus, manual vineyard management as well as harvesting. The Douro's best sites, rare outcroppings of Cambrian schist, are reserved for vineyards that yield high quality Port.
While more than 100 indigenous varieties are approved for wine production in the Douro, there are five primary grapes that make up most Port and the region's excellent, though less known, red table wines. Touriga Nacional is the finest of these, prized for its deep color, tannins and floral aromatics. Tinta Roriz (Spain's Tempranillo) adds bright acidity and red fruit flavors. Touriga Franca shows great persistence of fruit and Tinta Barroca helps round out the blend with its supple texture. Tinta Cão, a fine but low-yielding variety, is now rarely planted but still highly valued for its ability to produce excellent, complex wines.
White wines, generally crisp, mineral-driven blends of Arinto, Viosinho, Gouveio, Malvasia Fina and an assortment of other rare but local varieties, are produced in small quantities but worth noting.
With hot summers and cool, wet winters, the Duoro has a maritime climate.