Great Vintage Port Tasting

Vintage 1992 - Silver Jubilee 18%

In 1993 a couple of wine enthusiasts in Malmö, Sweden, with a special devotion for port wine, decided to start a Wine Society with focus on fortified wines, and port wine in particular. They decided to call the society 18%, both as an indication that the wines tasted in the society should hold more than 18% alcohol, but also as a fun remake of the The Swedish Academy, who are also called “The Eighteen”. One of the founders and original members of the Wine Society 18% is Sten Ivarsson – also co-founder of this web site. Both Jörgen and Stefan are also members since many years.

To celebrate the Silver Jubilee, marking the 25th anniversary of The Wine Society 18% we decided to have a special tasting. Unfortunately 1993 was a horrible year for Vintage Port and only one producer declared, Quinta da Romaneira’s single quinta Quinta das Liceiras. So to get a proper tasting we decided to add all the 1992 Vintage Ports as well. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge. We already had a lot of 1992’s in our cellars but we were of course missing some. After searching the web-sites of trustable re-sellers we could find a few more. Now we were down to three missing; Quinta dos Canais, Calem and Cruz. After talking to the producers and other experts we are now almost certain that Calem was never made, they only did Quinta da Foz in 1992. Cruz is still a bit unclear, it seems like it was declared but never sold. Quinta dos Canais was really hard to find but suddenly we got an email from our friend Axel Probst in Germany and he told us he had a bottle. So, with 23 Vintage Ports from 1992, which in fact can be all that have ever been on the market, plus the only existing 1993, we had our lineup for the Jubilee tasting ready with in total 24 Vintage Ports.

On November 8, 2018, we arranged the tasting in Malmö, and Axel Probst was kind enough to come and join us as a special guest. We were 16 attending participants in the tasting, which we set up in two flights with twelve wines in each flight. We had done a qualified guess on which wines should be the best, and put them in the last flight. Within each flight we randomly mixed the order to make the tasting semi-blind.

We have ranked the 1992 Vintage as an Excellent Vintage. The declaration was what is often called a split decision. The Symington’s and some others declared 1991 instead of 1992, whereas Taylor, Fonseca and Delaforce declared 1992. Many smaller companies declared both.

The top wines for the group were Taylor before Graham's Malvedos, not so surprising perhaps. The only 1993 in the tasting, Quinta das Liceiras, performed very well and was by many in the group ranked among the best. Fonseca did not perform as good as expected, some of us found the nose a bit off, without the normal power of a Fonseca but some loved it. On the positive side we found out that Calem Quinta da Foz performed very well, also Delaforce, Quinta Nova and Quinta do Passadouro were better than anticipated. The single quintas of Symington all performed on a good level, with Dow’s Quinta do Bomfim, Warre’s Quinta da Cavadinha and Quinta do Vesuvio all ranked very nice.

First flight:

Second 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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