1999 Quinta do Crasto Tinta Roriz Douro - this wine made from the Tinta Roriz grape (which is the Portuguese name for what the Spanish call tempranillo) was still quite dark and still shows spicy purple fruit notes. Clearly a hot country wine, if tasted blind the first thought might be toward Australia, except that the wine lacked the roast coffee and vanilla (sometimes coconut) notes usually found in wines raised in American oak, although to be fair a large number of Australian wineries have moved to more French oak in recent years. Mellow and soft now at a quarter century of age, it would still be a tough one to nail when tasting blind.
1 Like
Funny you should say, I came across a more recent vintage of this wine in a blind tasting once, and my thought process was similar. It definitely had people’s heads scratching - not one person (in a group of ~20) pegged it correctly as a Douro red. Not that it’s atypical for the region, just that I suspect dry Douro reds are a gap in most people’s tasting repertoire.
It probably would have been a gap in my experience too, had I not hosted a lunch for many years at a restaurant owned by a Portuguese friend who had a penchant for coming up with interesting Portuguese wines and pouring them blind, which made us concentrate on them and learn the ins and outs of their wines.
Plus I met Cristiano van Zeller at our Vancouver wine festival several times and had interesting conversations about his wines - he is a font of information about the wines of the area.