There are many styles of Port, the rich, sweet wine made from grapes grown in Portugal's wild Douro Valley. American Port lovers have voted with their pocketbooks for the style they prefer: Vintage Port, the biggest, brawniest, reddest, most long-aging, most expensive Port there is. It sounds a lot like the American general preference for Cabernet or Pinot Noir styles: the bigger the better, and don't spare the expense.

Making Port
In the making of all Ports, after the red Douro Valley grapes are crushed and fermentation has begun, a wallop of alcohol--in the form of brandy--is added to the fermenting vat. This has two effects: 1) it stops the fermentation process, meaning that some natural sweetness remains in the wine; and 2) it boosts the level of alcohol in the wine (this is why Port is classified as a "fortified" wine, with about 20% alcohol.) The young Ports--deeply purple, very sweet, high in alcohol--are then shipped down the Douro River to the city of Oporto, where they soften and get ready for a thirsty world. It is here that the basic dichotomy in the world of Port begins to emerge. Do you age those young Ports in barrels or in bottles? If you choose the former route--as producers do for most Ports--you have what is called "wood Port." If you choose the latter route, you have what is called "glass port."

Wood Port
It's useful to look at the extreme examples of each (there are many styles of Port that fall somewhere in between). A wood Port that has aged for many, many years in barrels--say twenty years or more--loses its purple color entirely and turns brownish or "tawny." It smells, and tastes, of toffee, butterscotch, vanilla, caramel--a miraculous transformation. It is round and smooth. I never make any secret of my preference: it is this type of Port that I find the most alluring, most enchanting, despite the fact that "Tawny Port" gets almost no respect from American wine geeks.

Glass Port
What wine geeks prefer, of course, is the ultimate example of "glass Port": Vintage Port. To make a Vintage Port, the producer uses wine from one year only (most Ports are blends of years). He takes that young vintage wine, holds it for two years in barrels (a very short time in Port-world chronology), and then bottles it young--while it is still wildly, vividly purple, while it is still chock-a-block with tannin, while the added alcohol has not yet married seamlessly with the red wine it's invading. So while the "wood Port" is just beginning its decades-long sojourn in wood, the "glass Port" is already out of the barrel and into a bottle. There, it ages much more slowly than it would in wood. Thirty or forty years later, it will still be red, not tawny, will still be tannic, and will still carry the types of aromas and flavors it had in youth: ripe red fruit, berries, sometimes a touch of prunes and raisins.

-David Rosengarten