Great Vintage Port Tasting

Vintage 1963

Our wine club ‘The Wine Society 18%’ celebrates its 20 th anniversary this year and we have during these 20 years tasted quite a lot of vintage port. It has been altogether 556 different vintage ports ranging from 1873 to 1999. Of course we have tasted a lot from the 21st century too, but they are so young. Unfortunately we have only tasted 3 vintage ports from the 19th century. We are 15 members and have 5 meetings/year and then some extra now and then. We are only 15 members so we can have quite rare bottles i.e. 1 bottle is enough. The meetings are in Malmö, Sweden. We had planned to have some tastings due to this celebration and started already the year before (i.e. 2012) as we planned our club the year 1992. The first of the celebration tastings was the vintage 1978 and after that we had celebration tastings of the vintages 1979 and 1947 as extra tastings this year and we have ended the celebration year with a Great Tasting of 1963 which included 38 houses.

The Wine Society 18% has had once a year a Great Tasting since 2005 and we started this Great Tasting with 39 houses of the vintage 1963 and after that we have had Great Tasting of the following vintages: 1960, 1966, 1970, 1975 and 1977 before our Celebration Year which included 4 Great Tastings. Unfortunately 4 of the houses from the tasting 8 years ago were missing this time but we had 3 new houses that we did not have last time.

We were 17 participants in the tasting. The tasting was semi-blind i.e. we know which houses participate in each Flight but not what we had in each glass. We had 4 Flights and in the last Flight we had, as we also had in 2005, an extra vintage Port i.e. Quinta de Noval Nacional 1962 and the same happened this tasting too, 1962 Nacional was split best in show!

The 1963 vintage is a classic Vintage, intense and perfect balanced, deep-purple, fruity and with a large aging capacity. Almost all shippers declared. According to Broadbent 25 shippers declared and according to Port Wine Institute, IVDP, 44 shippers declared. Broadbent and Decanter gave this vintage ***** out of 5*, Suckling 98 points out of 100 and IVDP 7 out of 7. We rated it as Classic and gave it 10 out of 10.

The tasting was conducted over four flights.
First flight:

Second flight:

Third flight:

Fourth flight:

Tasting notes. Note that the points are for the actual bottle tasted. Read about how we set point on the page "How to understand our points valuations"

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