Any Port in a Storm

Remember how I said in my last blog that we are 0-6 against Iowa? Make it 0-7. Iowa is good - and by "good" I mean they could beat the Nets and the Bobcats right now. Still, I was expecting us to show a little grit and win at least one of those seven. No such luck. Instead, we now sit at 10-17, hoping to climb back into the playoff picture.

After witnessing our lack of fortitude the past several games, I decided to search for solace in one of my favorite types of wine: Port. Port is a fortified wine, meaning that it has distilled spirits added to it (roughly equivalent to taking a basketball team and adding Charles Oakley). While this sounds like the concoction of an alcoholic chemist, it makes for truly delicious drinking. Here's how: fermentation in wine is the process by which yeast eat sugar, breaking it down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When distilled spirits are added before the process is complete, it kills off the yeast, leaving more sugar than is found in a fully fermented wine and creating a sweeter tasting wine. Corollary benefit: fortified wines also have a higher alcohol content than table wines.

Some common examples of fortified wine are Madeira, Port and Sherry. As with so many other old world wines, these fortified wines are named after their regions of origin: Madeira comes from the Madeira Islands off the coasts of Europe and Africa in the Atlantic, Sherry comes from Jerez, Spain (Sherry is an English bastardization of Jerez), and Port is named after the city of Porto in Portugal (get it? Port? Clever).

New world wineries, however, do make wines in these styles and typically refer to their wines as Madeira, Sherry and Port. There is a vociferous debate surrounding whether new world wineries should be able to label their wines as such: the European Union states that only products from those regions can carry such labels, but common practice tends to ignore those rules. While the debate carries real significance for the marketers of those wines, it is purely academic for you, the wine drinker. Good Port is good Port, regardless of its origin; I have had great bottles come from not only Portugal, but also from Australia and the U.S.

When buying a port, you will see several different descriptors on the bottles, the most common of which are Tawny, Ruby and Vintage. Tawny ports are aged in barrels, which exposes them gradually to oxygen, resulting in a brownish tint to the wine. Further, contact with the wooden barrel gives Tawny Ports a slight nutty flavor. Tawny Ports are also slightly sweeter than most other forms of Port. Barrel-aging is a very expensive way to make wine, so be prepared to spend a bit more money for Tawny Port.

By contrast, Ruby Port is aged in stainless steel and concrete containers. This is great from a cost-savings perspective - cheap production methods for the winery make for inexpensive and accessible wine for you - but steel and concrete do nothing to enhance the character of a wine. That said, Ruby Port can still be a very enjoyable drink with great Port characteristics and I do not mean to turn you off to it.

The third common descriptor found on Port bottles is "Vintage Port." With table wine, all of the grapes in a wine were from a given year, or vintage. Port houses (the accepted term for Port wineries), however, often combine wines from different vintages. This is not a bad thing at all, but rather ensures consistency in a house's product from year to year. In years where exceptional weather creates fine grapes (roughly 3 times per decade), Port houses will declare a vintage and will create port from grapes harvested in that year alone. The rarity of vintage years, and the resulting scarcity of Vintage Port, means that you will pay handsomely to get your hands on these wines (I do economics like Adam Smith).

The bottle I chose the other night was Warre's Warrior (www.warre.com), from Portugal, which I found for about $18 at Belmont Beverage. Readers around the country should be able to find the Warrior at most upscale wine shops. Fun fact: Warrior is the world's oldest brand of Port, having been shipped under that label since the 1750's. While wine snobs would scoff at me for saying this, almost all Port tastes nearly the same to me: there is usually a plummy flavor that dominates, combined with spices and chocolate. The differences I find are in the levels of sweetness, intensity of flavor and length of finish, all of which the Warrior delivered on. Definitely a bottle that I would drink again.

For those of you open to exploring the wine world, Port is a great avenue to take, and the Warrior is a solid starting place. On the same side of that token, if any of you are looking to infuse your basketball teams with fortitude from external sources, Port is also a good option.