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Port
VII: Kindly 1977
We
lucked into a bottle of porto’s great 1977 vintage. But sometimes luck is
facilitated by good practices.
Vintage
porto is too complex a wine, and too expensive a bottle, to stroll in and pull
one off the shelf as if one were picking up a German white to go with home-made
chicken noodle soup. The majority of port drinkers are not privileged to live in
a port-enclave, surrounded by aficionados who can advise on vintages and
shippers, and most of us have to read our way into satisfying purchases. Read,
that is, and strike up some mutually beneficial friendships. Here, I speak of
local wine-merchants.
Having gotten a sense of various wine establishments, I eventually
settled on two, maybe three, and, without being slavish to the rule, make most
of my purchases through them. I greet the staff by name, and if I get them
wrong, as I frequently do, at least I am recognized as the guy who gets names
wrong, each time he buys wine here.
More importantly, I am open to their advice, and I ask questions
straightforwardly. (Truth to tell, I pose most of my questions on red wines to
one seller, suggesting, I hope, that I know enough about whites, and direct most
of my questions on white wines to the other, implying that I am well-acquainted
with the world of reds. Perhaps I am only fooling myself.)
There things stood when I placed a telephone order with one shop for
several bottles of wine, including a just-released 1997 porto. Unbeknownst to
us, though, the last bottle from that shipper had already been sold, but as my
order was already paid-for, (and perhaps because the staff remembered my name
better than I remembered theirs) the shop made use of its right to substitute a
product of equal or greater value, here, a vintage 1977 from the same worthy
house. Thus I got a 22 year old bottle of port ready to drink, worth more than
double what I had paid for its toddler brother. And the wine shop, I might
add, got a customer for life. +++ |
