Port wine is really a niche within the wine world. While there are plenty of port wines available you just don’t see them nearly as often as you do traditional wines like Cabernet and Chardonnay. For instance, at 2 of the local wine stores I shop at only 1 really has a section dedicated to port wine.

Honestly, we don’t drink port that often. It’s really more of a dessert wine for us. I find it to be like brandy or sherry in that it’s super strong and almost immediately gives me heartburn. However, Robin really likes it so on occasion we’ll buy some in a restaurant, have some at a tasting or even buy a bottle to keep on hand. In particular, she likes a good tawny port.

Let me make a recommendation if you are a port wine drinker and would like to know where to find it. I was recently made aware of the site in that link where you can shop a large selection of port wines. They offer everything from tawny ports, white ports and California ports.

We’ve found that while many wines can be an acquired taste port wine is possibly even more so. It can be a bit more difficult to develop this taste as port wine is typically more expensive that your usual bottle of Zinfandel. Especially for vintage ports which start around $40 and go up to several hundred dollars.

A brief description and history of port follows courtesy of www.portwine2u.com:

A vintage wine is a selection of the very best wines from a single exceptional year. It is kept in cask for two years and then put into bottles, where it will continue maturing for many years. Each bottle is laid horizontally and given a splash of white paint, so that it will always rest with that side uppermost. The natural deposit will settle opposite the ‘splash’.

Vintage ports are shipped soon after bottling, and it is up to the wine merchant or the buyer to lay it down for years to come – at least ten, and as much as fifty. Single quinta ports are ready to drink around ten years old, and can last up to twenty years.