Taylor Fladgate - 10 Year Tawny Porto NV (750ml)
Price: $33.99
| Producer | Taylor Fladgate |
| Country | Portugal |
| Region | Douro |
| Subregion | Oporto |
| Varietal | Port Blend |
| Sku | 60131 |
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With an intense amber tawny color, the wine has sweet, elegant apricot flavors, delicate wood notes and rich, seductive aromas of mature fruit. Full-bodied and highly concentrated.
Taylor Fladgate Description
This superb example of aged tawny Porto is made from selected grapes from the best vineyards of the Cima Corgo and Douro Superior. Taylor Fladgate is an area leader in winemaking technology, as one of only three Porto producers to pioneer the development of piston fermenter techniques, called Port Toes, that extract significantly greater flavor and aroma than conventional pump-over fermentation. Fermentation is halted by the addition of grape spirits before all the residual sugar has been fermented, creating a sweet, fortified wine. Individual wines produced in different vintages are aged in 600-liter oak casks for years, over which time they will lose their young, dark purple-black color to gain the distinctive “tawny” hue from which the wine takes its name. As tawnies age, the wines take on increasingly more nutty flavors and become more concentrated as the barrels lose 3% of their volume every year (the “Angels’ Share”) to evaporation. The 10 Year Old Tawny is a blend created using tawnies with an average of 10 years of aging.
Wine Spectator: 91 Points
This has a nice racy edge to the mix of slightly dried red cherry and raspberry fruit, backed by red tea and singed vanilla. Shows good tension from start to finish. Drink now. 500 cases imported.
Wine Advocate: 90 Points
Easily the 10 with the most weight in the Fladgate group's lineup this issue, it is a rather powerful 10 year old Tawny with plenty of pop, the biggest and baddest of the trio (Fonseca, Croft and this). There is very fine concentration of flavor for a 10 year old Tawny. If I had a quibble, the alcohol shows at times, especially early on and rather notably when drunk a little too warm. (Around 60 degrees Fahrenheit is a lot better than room temperature most of the time, to be sure, not just here.) Overall, the weight, complexity, mouth feel and grip on the finish still make this my favorite of the group of 10s submitted by Taylor Fladgate this issue, although it's close and there are some pros and cons. This comes with a bar top cork, i.e., not intended to be aged (although it most certainly can hold a couple of decades barring cork failures).
Wine Enthusiast: 90 Points
This very complete aged tawny has all the right nuts and fruit characters that show a Port that still looks back to its fruity origins. The style is ripe, full and sweet, a mellow wine that only hints at the spirit behind it.
