A castle, a forgotten cellar and a vintage port extravaganza 

At the end of my most recent article about starting a wine collection on a budget, the one about Spain and Portugal, I suggested laying down cases of port for newborns.

After writing it, I came across someone whose father had done just that for his grandchildren, but whose appreciation of the multi-case gift has been severely dented by the subsequent storage charges. Professional storage facilities may charge only about £15 a case a year but with a wine as long-term as vintage port, one that demands to be kept for several decades before it shows what it’s capable of, it all adds up.

The answer perhaps is to have your own medieval castle with nice cold, dark cellars. This was the happy position Lord and Lady Barnard found themselves in when they inherited Raby Castle in the far north-east of England in 2016. The place is a rabbit warren of more than 100 rooms in varying stages of decay.

The building is so rambling that it presumably took the current Barnards some time to discover that in the cellars were stone bins full of vintage port, undisturbed for up to a century. The port had been bought by Lord Barnard’s predecessors to provide stirrup cups whenever they went hunting. They must have hunted a lot.

When the Barnards — or rather Christie’s wine people, who they called in to sell the port — examined the collection in detail they found a total of 756 bottles, dating from 1950 back to 1924. From a port lover’s point of view, it was extraordinary that the very finest vintages remained: Taylor’s 1948, Fonseca 1934, Dow’s 1927, Dow’s 1924 — and Cockburn 1950, a spotty adolescent in vintage port terms.

The beautifully kept cellar books show the consumption of each bottle from the early years of the last century to the 1960s, after which the vintage port collection seems to have been ignored. So all the 1908s and 1912s have been drunk alas, and an earlier Barnard had already started on the 1924s, so a mere 36 bottles of this classic wine remained. But there were 200 bottles of the equally rare Fonseca 1934. When I attended a lunch at Raby Castle in late April to taste the ports, I found this to be the most outstanding wine of the lot.

I arrived from London to find Adrian Bridge, CEO of The Fladgate Partnership that now owns Fonseca as well as Taylor’s, and Charles Symington, head winemaker for Symington Family Estates, busy opening two bottles of each of these venerable wines, so much older than most wines I get to taste. These incomers from Porto were at a table in front of Castle Raby’s vast fireplace in the rifle-bedecked great hall. They were busy applying port tongs, heated in the fire until they glowed, to the necks of the bottles so that with any luck they cracked neatly. (Corkscrews would struggle with corks deliberately designed to stay in place for so many decades, so really old bottles of vintage port need an alternative technique.)

Edwin Vos and Noah May of Christie’s were in attendance ahead of their June sale of the ports, as well as some notable port enthusiasts and specialists.

We were rather loath to leave these 10 decanters of some of the rarest ports in the world but Lady Barnard was determined to take us on a whistle-stop tour of the castle before lunch, culminating in the cellar. It had clearly been a port-dominated wine collection, though now all that remained in the port bins were the typed labels hanging above them. A few bottles of ancient St-Émilion were left in one; three dusty bottles of Gordon’s gin in another. The St-Émilion labels were too dusty to read during our rapid visit but I assume the Christie’s staff would have liberated them had the bottles been valuable.

The dining room to which we ascended was predictably handsome. When we all sat down and started talking, an interesting coincidence emerged. That very day, April 25, was the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution which saw the downfall of the previous authoritarian regime. The reason the date had been chosen back in January had nothing to do with the history of the country that produced the treasures we were about to taste; it was just conveniently close to the date that Adrian Bridge had to come to the UK.

Bridge had, again coincidentally, decided to provide Taylor’s 50-year-old tawny as a “mouthwash” prior to the vintage ports, and Charles Symington, who didn’t know what Bridge was providing, also happened to supply a 50-year-old tawny to prepare our palates — Graham’s Single Harvest 1974 Tawny Port.

So after asparagus and Yorkshire beef, served with some of the table wines that each of these pre-eminent port shippers now make, we sipped these two “mouthwashes” with the apricot tart that preceded the cheeses designed to go with the vintage ports.

Now came the moment when the Raby relics, so unusual in not having been moved an inch for decades, were to be tasted, from decanters moved, as is the custom for port, in a clockwise direction round the table. Cockburn 1950 has never been a famous vintage port. “Rather undistinguished” is how wine chronicler and founder of Christie’s wine department Michael Broadbent dismissed his most recent tasting of it in his 2002 classic Vintage Wine. But it served as an excellent entrée to the glories to come.

Taylor’s 1948 is a famous wine. “Invariably magnificent”, according to Broadbent. And indeed it was showing extremely well at Raby Castle — if anything, amazingly, its magnificence still tightly wound and the wine yet to reach its peak. It was made in the same year that Fonseca, run by the Guimaraens family, was acquired by the company now known as The Fladgate Partnership. So the glorious Fonseca 1934 would have been made by a member of the Guimaraens family, one of whose descendants, David Guimaraens, is now head winemaker for The Fladgate Partnership. Apples don’t fall far from the tree in the port business.

The Dow ports from the 1920s were each a fully mature joy, made long before any of us was born. The first bottle of Dow’s 1927 was admittedly a little bit tired (as well it might be) but the second was a sweet treat leading to Dow’s signature dry, peppery finish, while the centenarian was even more vivid. Still with a hint of purple in its ruby colour, it was quite incredibly lively and juicy.

As a leading member of the port trade, Bridge presumably has a fair portion of port in his bloodstream almost permanently, but added to an email about how the date of this port extravaganza was fixed: “I would have travelled to taste those wines whatever date Edwin chose.”

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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