Quinta de Ervamoir 10 y.o.
We spied a bottle of Ramos Pintos’s Quinta de Ervamoir 10 y.o. tawny port in the Chop House and opted to head there for a post-prandial drink one evening.
It’s a light, almost orange, vibrant red, with the translucency one expects of tawny ports. The taste is surprisingly fresh and fruity, given it has had ten years to age (lending a woody taste). In fact the “10 years” is the average age of the various wines that have been blended in to create the appropriate taste.
I do have a soft spot for tawny ports, as I often find ruby can be heavy going. One advantage of tawny ports is that they’re barrel-aged, as opposed to the bottle ageing of ruby ports. The barrel, being permeable to oxygen, means that a ruby tawny port is oxidised before it hits the bottle – the older it is, the more it has oxidised. So what does this mean? Well, it means you can open a bottle of tawny and it won’t “go off” – it’s already oxidised, unlike a ruby which will start to oxidise as soon as it’s open. So, you can keep a tawny open without worry, and drink it over a few weeks, months, or even years. Not that we faced any such problem at the Chop House…