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How important is the bottling date for a colheita ?

Good question Luc, I haven't got the foggiest, which means if someone does answer, I'm on the learning curve...

Alan

Now , I have , what has been determined as a good question .
Waiting for that good If not excellent answer . . .

it can be very important. If you have two bottles of the same vintage, bottled 10-20 years apart, then they will taste different. I've had a couple colheitas bottled a few years apart and i could tell the difference.

That is why I always post the bottling date on my tasting notes. Same applies to tawnys with an indication of age. These are blends and can vary slighty with each bottling run. So its not really fair to directly compare a port bottled 10 years ago with one bottled this year.

You say that you can taste the difference .
How is one bottled , say 25 yrs , different than one bottled this year ?

The longer the gap between vintage and bottling, the longer the wine has spent in the barrel - so it will be paler and have more concentrated sugars. This is known as oxidative aging, as the wine is able to breathe through the wood of the barrel.

The time it spends in bottle afterwards will result in a little maturation in the absence of air - this is called reductive aging. In practice, this second phase has a less noticeable effect, but all wood ports tend to be a little coarse if drunk soon after bottling - a decade or so in the bottle tends to smooth them out nicely!

Tom

mainly the type of port your talking about is a Colheita. These spend their life in small oak barrels. They will age differently as they are in barrel still, compared to a small glass bottle...exposure to oxygen, wood, etc. That is why young colheita's still have some fresh red fruit to them and the older colheitas have lost that and are typically more nutty, tobacco/cedar, vanilla notes, etc. Also as they age in barrels, the tannins start to mellow. As an example, a 1937 colheita typically isn't going to have the large tannins that say a 1997 colheita will. Older ones also tend to become more acidic, which I like.

For me, I really like when Colheita's hit that 30+ year mark. I think that is when they really start to take on the nutty, carmel, vanilla, cigar box, etc flavors. Dont get me wrong i still drink and love younger colheitas, as they offer a good QPR, but I prefer the older ones.

How can you tell on tawny when it was bottled? Don't recall seeing a bottled date? I have seen it on some Madeira.

Almost all tawnys with an indication of age will have it on the front or back label. It's usually really small print somewhere and you really gotta look for it sometimes. The basic ones, I don't think have it...then again I've never really cared to look on the basic tawny's.

My experience on the bottling date is that it is - like it was said - very important. The differences are already pointed out. The wine will not age in the bottle in the way it ages in the pipas (small barrels). That means that if you compare a 10y old Tawny to a 20 or 30y old you will encounter firstly other flavours and secondly more intensity. That is due to the ageing process (oxidation and evaporation) in the wooden barrel.

I had a very good example on how important the bottling date can be. I bought a lot of bottles from the Colheita 94 of Niepoort, some being bottled 2003 and some 2006. The 06s were different and better than the 03 bottlings, more intense and more tastful. Although only 3 years apart the ageing process can make a remarkable difference on the palate.

The bottling date is almost always on every Tawny you encounter: it might have abbreviations like eng, emb or btl followed by the year of bottling in 4 digits.

Axel