My second-floor room in the Carris hotel was a mere bottle’s throw across a cobbled street from the historic Factory House, a de facto clubhouse for the British port shippers in Oporto, northern Portugal. When I woke at 7am, I could see the Wedgwood-blue ballroom swarming with people hard at work decanting the three bottles of each of the 19 great vintage ports we were to taste that morning. When the tasting started at 11.30am, we were warned that this exercise was a one-off. That morning half of the world’s stock of Cockburn 1896, for example, would be opened, and there would be only four bottles of the 1912 left after our predations.
Cockburn’s is the best-known name in port, thanks to Cockburn’s Special Reserve, a wine I would guess is hardly ever drunk by the tight-knit group of port producers in Oporto and the Douro Valley upriver of the port city. But in the first half of the last century Cockburn vintage ports were regarded as the finest in the world and Cockburn’s new owners and erstwhile competitors, the Symington family, who officially took over in 2010, are determined to restore the company’s reputation from mass market to fine wine.
A Reserve ruby selling at about £10 a bottle all over the world, Cockburn’s Special Reserve was launched in 1969 as a sort of red sister to the then hugely successful Harveys Bristol Cream sherry. Until then the isolated port trade had pottered along hand-selling top-quality vintage ports perhaps three times a decade and satisfying the mass markets in France and the UK in particular with bulk shipments of young ruby and tawny.