As I write this, the sun is setting in San Diego — and a perfect excuse to bust into the 20-year tawny sitting on the shelf. What’s the difference between ruby and tawny, vintage, LBV, Colheita and dated single Quinta vintage port? Well, fresh off our tasting/education with Taylor Fladgate, I thought that I’d spell out the process in a very concise format so that even a wine novice could understand it and use it to impress their friends and family. What is port wine? Easy. Port wine is a fortified wine from the Douro region of Portugal that has been “shipped” through the city of Porto or Oporto, depending on your language. What does fortified mean? Well, port wine begins just like any regular wine. The grapes are grown, harvested, pressed and allowed to “macerate” with the skins (unless it’s a white port) for just a few days. The wine begins its initial fermentation, only to be stopped quite abruptly by the addition of a distilled spirit, which most of the time is a brandy. When you add something with the high level of alcohol like a brandy, the first thing to happen is that the yeast doing its work on fermenting the sugars to alcohol are instantly killed. Most ports are allowed to ferment to about 5 percent alcohol before the 80 proof brandy is added. What you’re left with is a wine with high alcohol (~20 percent) and a good amount of residual sugar (r/s, if you want to sound cool). Why the heck would you want this? Who thought this up? Very simply, it was the English. During their long war with France, England looked to their seaport allies for many things, including wine. Unfortunately, the wine didn’t have great closures and would spoil before making it to England. Thus, the idea of “upping” the alcohol to protect the wine on its voyage. A happy accident — much like champagne, or heavily hopped ales. Alright, now that I understand port wines, what are the differences between the different styles? At this point, nothing. All port wine is finished in the same way. Much of the pressing of the grapes is done by foot. This is because most of the Douro was without electricity until 1979. The juice gets a little taste of fermentation, then it gets punched in the face with the addition of brandy. Where then does it go? Wood vats called “pipes.” All port wine stays in these wood vats until the second spring after harvest. It is at this point that each individual port house makes the decision to … Declare a Vintage! That’s the goal with all of your port. Declaring a vintage means putting the year of harvest on the label, waiting for the scores from Parker & Speculator, and then jacking up the price to get the most for your juice. But, the better houses only declare a few vintages per decade, and even when they do, they pick only the best juice, sometimes a fraction of their entire harvest. If they declare a vintage, the wine goes into bottles for aging and eventual sale. What happens to all of the juice not included with the vintage, or all of the juice in a non-vintage year? Well, one or more of the following happens: 1. Wine is bottled and offered for sale. This is called ruby port. Hey, isn’t that the same as vintage port? Yup, except that the date can’t be put on the label. It’s non-vintage vintage port. This is usually the least expensive port. 2. Wine is bottled and held back for a few more years (four to six total years) and sold with a date on it. This is late bottle vintage, or LBV for short. The idea here is to offer a non-vintage expression of one vintage with proper minimum age on it to enjoy on release. These wines sell for a fraction of a normal vintage year with the benefit of being ready to drink. 3. Wine is bottled, labeled with a vintage, but not from a vintage year. This is single Quinta vintage port. The house wants to showcase their best wine from the single estate and designate it with a vintage year. These wines typically sell at a steep discount to vintage years, but can be the second most expensive of the ports. 4. Wine is put in small barrels for some time. If the wine from one year’s harvest gets mixed with one or more other harvest years, this is what is known as “tawny” port. The age on a bottle of tawny represents the “average age” of wines in the mix. A 10-year tawny would have an average age of 10 years, and a 40-year one would equal an average age of 40 years. We tried a 40-year tawny at the Taylor tasting that had its oldest harvest year as 1909! Tawny ports usually have a brownish tint and are much lighter in fruit and much more pronounced in nutty, butterscotch and marzipan flavors. 5. The last port, and one of my favorites (other than the first four favorites) is kind of a cross between number 2 and number 4. Colheita ports are those from non-vintage years that spend the first few years with all of the wine, but when a vintage doesn’t get declared, the wines go into barrel — for a long time! The amount of time is determined by the customer. The wine doesn’t get bottled until a customer orders it. Don’t think of the customer as an individual, but more likely an importer of wine from another country. They’ll bottle it, put the date of the harvest year (not a vintage), and ship it. These wines to me are the best example of one harvest, along with barrel aging, making it a cross between ruby, tawny and vintage, all in one. Are we clear on all of this, or did I just confuse the heck out of you? Oh, one more thing. I posted a question/contest on Twitter about the difference between a ruby a tawny port — in one word. Nobody got it right. This is right from Robert Bower, seventh generation of the Fladgate family. The difference is: air. Rubies are bottle aged, tawnies are barrel aged. The slats in the barrel allow oxygen in to accelerate the “aging” of the ruby ports. This softening would roughly equal in a very short time the aging you’d see in a bottle over a very long time. So, there you go. All port starts out the same. All ports start out as Ruby ports. The path after the first two years is where things get different. One last piece of advice: Don’t fall for those fancy port glasses from the big crystal houses. Even Mr. Bower from Taylor Fladgate agreed with me — the best port glass is any tulip-shaped glass. We use brandy snifters and I wouldn’t have it any other way! Finally, this article is done, the night is in full effect, and my glass of wine is empty. I think it’s time to steal another pour. —Mike Kallay and his wife, Stephanie, own the Cask Room, a wine bar in East Village. www.caskroom.com