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The 1894 Port punches a ticket to the Fleurs de Fete
The saga of the 1894 Port (which makes its public debut above) has taken a few new twists, summarized in a Taste of Wine column that will run tomorrow (4-25-08) in the Dayton Daily News Life section — but because you Uncorked readers are special, y’all get a sneak peek:
It started with a phone call.
The call was not unlike several others I’ve fielded since I started writing this Taste of Wine column 19 years ago that followed the theme of, “I have this really old bottle of wine and was wondering … .”
In the vast majority of these cases, the wines were not built for the long haul, not meant to be aged, and the wines have no chance of being drinkable, short of a miracle.
But this call — from June Kiehne of Kettering — was different. It involved a port — a wine that is fortified with alcohol to reach the 20 percent or so threshold, which usually helps ports deal with the ravages of old age a bit better than unfortified wines. And it was a whopping 114 years old — an 1894 Tawny Port. Kiehne inherited the bottle from her father, who received it as a gift in 1950. She has had the port since 1977.
I was particularly intrigued because one of the greatest wines ever to cross my lips was an 1898 Vintage Port at a tasting in Bowling Green, Ohio, back in the mid-1980s. Generally tawnies have already been aged in barrel for a period before bottling and aren’t necessarily designed to improve further with bottle aging the way vintage ports are, but I thought maybe, just maybe, this wine had a chance to still be drinkable. Through the newspaper’s wine blog Uncorked , I summoned help from cyberspace, and wine enthusiasts from both here and afar responded.
Dennis Hall, local wine enthusiast and former owner of Fairfield Wine, searched the Portuguese version of Wikipedia and used an online translator to try to obtain information about the bottle. Hall concluded the wine “is a single-vintage tawny port from 1894 that stayed in barrel for many years and was perhaps bottled as recently as the late 1940s” before it was given as a gift Kiehne’s father.
Meanwhile, Nancy Bentley, co-owner of Kinkead Ridge Vineyards in Ripley, passed my query onto Andrew Jones, an international wine writer and broadcaster, who had just visited the region of Portugal that produces port and spent time at the prestigious producer Fonseca’s winery (the bottle of 1894 has the word “Fonseca” on it). Jones said our bottle of 1894 does not appear to have any connection to the current Fonseca port producer, and suggested the wine inside probably did not survive in good condition.
Kiehne has decided to donate the bottle for auction at this year’s Fleurs de Fete, the wine-and-food event to be held at Carillon Historical Park on May 18. She’s familiar with the Wellness Connection of the Dayton Region, which benefits from the festival and its live and silent wine auctions, and decided the donation was the right thing to do.
After seeing the bottle for the first time on Tuesday, April 22, at Arrow Wine & Spirits, where Kiehne handed the bottle over to Arrow for the Fleurs de Fete auction, I too am skeptical that the wine inside has survived to the point it would still be enjoyable to drink. Although the label and cork appear to be in good shape, the amount of wine in the bottle has dropped well below the “shoulder” of the bottle, which appears to be just over half full. That suggests a lot of evaporation has occurred, and a lot of oxygen has gotten into that bottle — not encouraging signs.
But I’ve encountered miracle bottles of old wine that exhibited plenty of similar ominous signs but defied the odds and turned out to be much better than expected. So I’ll keep hope alive, and root for another miracle for whoever takes a chance on a bottle of 114-year-old wine.
(End story)
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
(Photo by Mark Fisher)
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By chiefwino
April 25, 2008 7:40 AM | Link to this
Thanks to Ms. Kiehne for donating to the auction. Hopefully whoever buys the 1894 port will post their tasting notes. Any of the “serious” collectors in the Dayton area, please consider making a donation of a special bottle to the Fluers de Fete auction.