Taylor Fladgate Porto 20 Year Old Tawny 750ml

Expert Reviews

James Suckling 95 Points | The aromas to this beautiful tawny port are saturated with burnt orange peel, caramel, candied fruit and hints of honey-coated nuts. Full-bodied, very fruity and dense with intense nut and mahogany flavors. Hints of sultanas, chocolate and coffee. Extremely creamy, long and flavorful. Delicious all the way. Better served slightly chilled.

The Wine Spectator 93 Points | Rich, with a spicy nose, this offers flavors of fig, dried apricot, mango and ginger. Complex and elegant, delivering concentrated crme brle and tropical fruit notes that linger on the vibrant and buttery finish. (KM)

The Wine Advocate 93 Points | On first taste, this was simply Taylor: big, concentrated and serious. It was all that and a bag of chips, but over a couple of day it also demonstrated far more elegance. It seemed arguably better balanced than the 10 year old Tawny this issue. Simply filling the mouth on first taste, this shows fine complexity for its age and it does everything else rather brilliantly. Succulent and inviting, it finishes with waves of concentrated flavors. The fruit remains lifted and and it has a bright, transparent feel. It is hard to resist, often seeming like a bit of an overachiever. It’s not the best tawny Taylor’s submitted this issue, but it might be the best intersection of quality and price.

Winemaker 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 20 Year Old Tawny is a blend created using tawnies with an average of 20 years of aging.