Quinta do Noval Vintage Port 2020

Dark, brooding, velvet chaos - and built to outlive you.

This isn’t some dainty little dessert sipper you knock back after dinner while pretending to enjoy Stilton. This is Port with backbone - a proper beast, born from steep Douro slopes and centuries of stubborn Portuguese winemaking. Quinta do Noval doesn’t play the volume game. Only 7% of the estate’s juice made it into this bottle, which basically means you’re drinking the stuff they kept because it scared off everything else.

The 2020 vintage? A wild child. All Touriga Nacional, Tinto Cão, Sousão, and Tinta Roriz - no filler, no fluff. Forget Touriga Francesa this year - it didn’t make the cut. These grapes were foot-trodden the old-school way in granite lagares, and you can taste that tradition in every brooding, black-fruited hit. It’s as if someone liquefied a thunderstorm and aged it in old barrels until it got civilised enough to pour.

What you get is an avalanche of blackberry paste, fig, dark currant, and Turkish coffee - all swirling around a tarry, bramble-spiked spine. It’s sweet, yeah, but this isn’t sugary. It’s sensual, dense, and unapologetically rich. The tannins come in late like a heavy door slamming shut behind you - grippy, rising, holding everything together with the kind of structure that demands patience.

Right now, it’s bold and muscular, but give it 10, 15 years? You’ll have something unreasonably elegant. Something that doesn’t just whisper history - it growls it, with teeth. Critics are throwing 97s and 98s at it like they’ve run out of superlatives, and they’re not wrong. This is classic Noval - polished chaos with restraint, if that even makes sense.

Is it expensive? Yeah. Is it worth it? Also yeah. You’re not buying a bottle - you’re buying a future conversation with yourself 20 years from now, where you thank past-you for having excellent taste and questionable patience.

Verdict: A towering, time-bending Port that somehow manages power, grace, and absolute swagger in a single sip.
Put it down for a decade, or drink it now if you’re in the mood to get wrecked - gloriously.

« GO HOME