Bottle of port will put a smile on face of wine lover

Golden Thumb Award

Robust aromas of dark chocolate, black licorice, mocha, cola nut and ripe black cherries. Flavors mimicked the aromas with muscular tannins, bright acidity which accented the dark berry fruit and muted the wine’s inherent sweetness.

Note: Wines are rated on a scale ranging up from Thumbs Down, One Thumb Mostly Up, One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Up, Two Thumbs Way Up and Golden Thumb Award. Prices are suggested retail prices as provided by the winery, one of its agents, a local distributor or retailer.

Every fall, I hold a weekly series of themed wine tastings. They are quite popular on several different levels. Some come for the convivial atmosphere (early in the season, we have the tastings outside); some come with discerning palates and open minds eager to absorb facts, figures and flavors of unexplored regions or grape varieties.

Whatever the topics of the previous two months of Wine Wednesdays, we always finish the series with port. Why? Well, if you’re talking to my boss, my reason is that when the air gets crisp and we start stoking logs in the fireplace, the fortified wines of northern Portugal are just the thing.

The real reason, however, is that I just love port and I’ll borrow any excuse to taste a few bottles at the same time.

That was not always the case. My initial contact with something call “port” was that awful stuff ostensibly meant for cooking. Bleh! Some years later, I got a hold of the real stuff from Portugal and I’ve never turned back. My enjoyment of port was most certainly — ahem — “fortified” by my two extensive tours of the cities of Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia, where the storage and business is done, and the breathtakingly beautiful Douro River Valley, where the grapes are grown and the wine is made.

I enjoy all types of port (and there are a lot of them): rubies, late-bottled vintage, simple 10-year tawnies, not-so-simple 20-, 30- and 40-year tawnies, colheitas and even the ugly stepchild, white port, which I prefer as a spritzer with a slice of lemon.

I hold a special place in my heart, however, for true vintage port, especially well-kept bottles from years long past. More than any other type of wine, vintage port gains character as time marches on.

In my charmed career, I’ve had the chance to examine and enjoy ports from the greatest vintages, such as 1945, 1963, 1970, 1977 (one of my faves), 1980, 1985 and 1994. The futures of the 2003s and 2007s, babies in world of port, show great promise.

I find it hard to describe classic ports, since I have somewhat of an emotional response to them. To me, a mature port from a fabulous vintage tastes like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with a full chorus. There is so much going on that it’s hard to focus on any one thing, but taken together, it is a gorgeous thing to behold. Also, since port houses make vintage port only in the better years — and vintage years are not all equal — the opportunity to enjoy wine from a significant release is special.

At my most recent tasting held in late November, we had some fine offerings from Ramos Pinto and Graham’s (including their somewhat rare 30-year tawny and the underappreciated 1980 vintage). The sublime star of the show, however, was the 2011 Graham’s Vintage. Its massive dark berry, chocolate and cola aromas and flavors were hard to assess that night, but I had the chance to taste it the next night and the following night. It bloomed into something exceptional, the likes of which I’ve had to good fortune to taste only a few times.

If you want to put a smile on the face of the wine lover in your life this holiday season (or in any of the seasons to come in the next 40 to 50 years), consider a 2011 vintage port and perhaps the Graham’s specifically. After all, you can’t do much better gift-wise than wrapping up a symphony in a bottle.