Wine Pick: Dow's Vintage Port
Dow’s is one of the classic names of Port production, a British family of ‘shippers’ who used to buy and bottle wines before shipping them back to Britain under their own name.
This is the origin of other distinctly British-sounding names in Porto such as Graham’s, Warre’s and Taylor’s for example and there are still British families living and working in the industry today which own these historic companies – and they’re old too, Graham’s marked its 250th anniversary this year, Warre’s its 350th and Taylor’s is over 300 years old too.
Dow’s, along with Graham’s, Warre’s and Cockburn’s are all owned by the Symington family, who’ve been operating as Port shippers since the 19th century.
These companies are also the real standard bearers of that most classic of Port styles in the British market – vintage Port, which are only ‘declared’ in the very best years; sometimes only a few times a decade – although both the Symingtons and the owners of Taylor’s recently declared three vintages in a row between 2015 and 2018 (2015-2017 for the Symingtons and 2016-2018 for Taylor’s) which was the first time either company had down so in their entire histories.
Rich and powerful in their youth, these wines really benefit from ageing and will happily last for decades, wines from the 1930s can still be in good shape – though they’re pretty rare these days. Still, vintage Port make excellent presents for major anniversaries.
This Dow’s 1980 for example is drinking extremely well sat present and still has quite considerable richness and fruit concentration to it. If you’re lucky enough have any 1980 yourself I’d definitely recommend a bottle over Christmas.
If you have any 1985 Vintage Port, however, then you should count yourself extremely lucky as that’s one of the great post-war vintages and almost certainly the best of the 1980s.