5.30pm - 6.10pm
Discover the Origin - Port the King of Wines
Hosted by Tim Atkin
In a class of its own, Port is a unique fortified wine style hailing from the spectacular terraced vineyards of Portugal’s Douro Valley. It has inspired imitations from many of the world’s wine regions but much as with Champagne, none of the competitors can match a top vintage Port from a good producer.
Port is a brilliant, unique wine style that derives its flavour, strength and sweetness from the process of adding spirit to still-sweet part-fermented grape must. Actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that Port represents two rather different wine styles, depending whether the wine is primarily aged in bottle or in cask.
Most people will probably be familiar with the sweet, dark, tannic, richly fruited style of Vintage and Single Quinta Ports which are bottled fairly young, and will then slowly age to mellowness. Less commonly appreciated are the cask-matured Ports known as Tawny or Colheita (these are vintage dated tawnies), which are typically lighter in colour, with soft, spicy nutty flavours and less overt fruitiness.
Discover the Origin is a vibrant campaign to bring awareness to the quality and provenance that the DOC mark brings to products in Europe. It is through this campaign, that we have the opportunity to have Tim Atkin, select some of the best ports this region has to offer.
Tim Atkin MW is one of Britain’s leading wine writers and an internationally recognised expert on the subject. He is the wine correspondent of The Observer, where he appears every Sunday in OM , and Wine Editor at Large of OLN. He also writes for Wine & Spirit, Woman and Home, The World of Fine Wine, The Economist’s Intelligent Life, Country House and Observer Food Monthly. He appears regularly as a presenter on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen.
Tim has contributed to a number of books on wine, including the New World of Wine, as well as writing two of his own - Chardonnay and Vins de Pays d'Oc. He was also the co-author with Anthony Rose of five editions of the annual consumer guide, Grapevine. He has judged wines in the UK, France, the United States, Argentina, Spain, South Africa, Chile and Australia and is co-chairman of the London-based International Wine Challenge, the world’s biggest blind tasting competition.
http://www.discovertheorigin.co.uk
http://timatkin.com/