Great Vintage Port Tasting

Vintage 1983

This vintage is a rated as an Outstanding Vintage with 36 houses i.e., almost all producers declaring it. It was a split decision between 1982 and 1983 vintage and their good qualities have never been questioned. In November we usually have our Great or Semi Great Tasting and up to today we have had Great Tastings i.e. more than 20 houses of the vintages 1960, twice of the 1963, 1966, 1970, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982 and Semi-Great Tastings of 1947, 1958, 1979, 1984 and 1988. In addition we have had House Tastings of Calem, Cockburn, Ferreira and Guimaraens.

The weather during 1983 was variable. The winter was cold and dry, while most of the spring was extremely wet resulting in poor flowering in some vineyards. The summer had a moderate temperature with some rain, but in early September the nature smiled turned into glory. The wines were firm with well-focused fruit and lovely backbone and they were deep purple and fruity, rich in tannins, and with a very good aging capacity.

Broadbent gave this vintage **** out of 5*, Suckling 92 points out of 100 and we 9 out of 10 points. We believed that the vintage was Outstanding, but this was not the case in our Great Tasting. We have now changed this vintage to the rating Very Good. Many wines were defect with volatile acidity and many wines were not what we had expected, sorry to say. However, some of them were excellent such as Quarles Harris, Gould Campbell, Graham's, Smith Woodhouse and of course Taylor.

The Wine Society 18% had a Great Tasting 16 and 18 March 2017 of 31 Houses. We know of 57 houses/brands, see all Vintage 1983s here. We have earlier tasted another 20 houses from the Vintage, which do not participate in this Great Tasting but we surely enjoyed drinking them when they passed our lips. We were 16 participants in the tasting. The tasting was semi-blind i.e. we knew which houses participated in each Flight but not what we had in each glass.

The tasting was conducted over three flights.
First flight:

Second flight:

Third 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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