Port wine

I’m a bit of a wine and spirits buff, so I really liked the port tour, and had a lot of fun learning about how it’s made. So, for those interested, here’s a crash course on port in 400 words or less. And if you're not interested, then you're still reading it anyway.

If you’ve never had it, port is a strong, sweet wine you normally drink a small glass of right before or right after a big meal. It’s made like any other wine, except the fermentation is stopped early. Aguardiente (basically unaged brandy) is added to the wine, which kills the yeast and raises the alcohol percentage to 20%. The extra sweetness in port is caused by killing off the yeast before they get a chance to eat all the sugar in the wine and convert it to alcohol.

That’s for all five kinds of port. The differences come from what happens next.

·         Tawny port is put into small oak barrels to age. Since the barrels are small, the port has more contact with the wood and air, making it taste sweeter, pick up honey and vanilla flavors from the wood, and turn dark and slightly clear from exposure to the air. Tawny port is red-brown.

·         Ruby port is put into large barrels to age (as in room-sized instead of man-sized). Since it has less exposure to air and wood, it tastes and looks more like the original wine, and is less sweet. Ruby port is dark red-violet.

·         Vintage port is made from very good ruby port from a very good year; they only make a vintage port a few times every decade. They let it age for just a few years, then bottle it without filtering the sediment and yeast out. This lets it still change in the bottle, whereas ruby and tawny ports (which are filtered before bottling) stop changing as soon as they’re put in glass. As such, vintages are the only ones worth aging after you buy them.

·         Late-bottled vintage port is essentially a really good ruby port. It was going to be a vintage, but the blender decided it wasn’t quite up to snuff when he tasted it, and it was filtered and bottled like any other ruby.

·         White port is made from white wine, and is aged very briefly before being bottled. It’s normally viewed as not quite as good as red port.