The view from the far side of the hill

Not so long ago I was at a dinner to celebrate an engagement, and a bottle of wine from the northern Rhône valley was brought out with the air of something intended to be special. It was indeed a grand bottle, but it was the newest available vintage fresh from the wine merchant’s, and there wasn’t even a decanter in the house to help it breathe for a while. (I had been recently been witness to my host’s decanter shattering spectacularly on the tiled porch floor.) What we drank was a wine that, while evidently beautifully poised to age into something special, was still a fairly impenetrable mesh of tight black fruit and pepper.

By and large, the better the wine, the longer it should be kept after bottling before it reaches its drinking peak. While low end wines should be ready to drink immediately, and will only decline if kept, in the best wines, the youthful state is only a hint of the joy that can unfold in manifold flavour layers when the wine is properly aged. Even moving down from the elevated category of very grand wines, I think that most wines retailing from £15-£20 are drunk quickly, without the couple of the years lying on their side in a cool, dark place that so many of them would benefit from. What is devilishly difficult, of course, and is often only achieved in retrospect, is determining when the wine has reached that properly aged state, beyond which, while it continues to develop, the overall trend will be downwards.

I myself rather enjoy wines that have gone a little beyond what most people might consider their optimum drinking window, since that stage of wine development, as well as a smooth, low tannin texture in the reds, can sometimes throw up odd, gamey flavours that are rather different – things like that may sound unpleasant, like rotting mandarins and Worcester Sauce, but that are actually – at least as far as I’m concerned – intriguing.

It was in this spirit that I asked my favourite wine merchant if he had anything in the back shop or the vaulted cellar that, while doing me for everyday drinking, would also give me a well-aged wine hit, and this Portuguese wine is what he came up with.

Quinta de la Rosa ’91

Quinta means farm in Portuguese, and can also refer to a wine-producing estate or vineyard. Quinta de la Rosa is a large, well-regarded producer of both ports and unfortified wines from the classic port grapes.

This red wine is faded at the rim, but there’s no hint of the rust or brown colour that can appear in very aged wine. The first sniff does say the Douro (in Portugal) / Duero (in Spain) river valley, with the hot black fruit of port and Ribera del Duero. It has that characteristically aged smell of fading, muted fruit mixed with smooth oak. On the palate, it is sharp, the tannin mostly having worn out and the acids mostly remaining; so the feel, an acid, alcoholic tang, reminds me of mouthwash – but not, as an Australian friend would say after she insulted you, in a bad way. It isn’t a great wine; it has not developed any fascinating secondary or tertiary flavours, and while there is some fruit left, it’s a dull, faded core. But it does have that soft, aged feel, a bit of wood; a pleasant mix of oaky vanillins, the remains of plummy fruit and enough acid. In a better wine that mix of acid and well-aged fruit would be doing fascinating things like chutney and damp earth. This is by no means a grand wine, but considering the nineteen years of age, has survived well enough to remain a pleasant, if unreflective, evening’s tipple.