Taylor's
40 Year Old Port
Tawny Port
NV

The producer

Founded in 1692 by Job Bearsley, Taylor’s is one of the oldest of the original founding Port houses. Still today the company remains independent and focusing solely of production of port wine. Taylor’s own some of the finest vineyards in the Douro Valley – including Quinta de Vargellas, Quinta de Terra Feita, and Quinta do Junico – while also sourcing fruit from estates owned by its 22 partner grape growers. All the port wines are aged in the cellars at Vila Nova de Gaia. The Vintage port, Single Quinta de Vargellas, and Aged Tawnys are amongst the finest produced in the region.

The wine

Taylor’s 30-and 40-year-old Tawny Ports are sourced from fruit in the eastern Douro Valley and matured in seasoned oak casks in the House’s cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia. Both wines are lush with velvety texture and rich nutty aromas, the 40-year-old displaying a touch more complexity, depth, and length, given the longer ageing.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a a guide to our customers.