SANDEMAN 20 Year Old Tawny Port Bottle

Description

Sandeman 20 Year Old Tawny Porto is a beautifully balanced wine, showcasing an average age of 20 years from carefully selected wines. Decanter awards it 97 points, praising its lovely pale amber-tawny colour and alluring character on both the nose and palate. Richard Mayson describes it as silky and seductive, with creamy fruit and toasty complexity. James Suckling rates it 94 points, highlighting bright amber hues with notes of toffee, caramel, and orange marmalade, alongside a lively palate characterized by medium sweetness and steady acidity. The Wine Advocate scores it 92 points, noting its freshness, complexity, and tightly wound structure, with hints of caramel and chocolate. Wine Enthusiast recognizes its elegant profile and integration of flavors, making it perfect for immediate enjoyment.

*****

Wines between 15 to 35 years old combine in this wine to create an average age of 20 years. The younger wines bring vibrant dried and candied fruit flavours while the older wines provide rich, nutty, caramel and spice notes.

DECANTER 97 points
Tasted by: Richard Mayson
(at Know your Port styles tasting, 09 Dec 2022)
Drinking Window: 2022 - 2025
Sandeman has a long track record for producing outstanding tawnies at every levell. Lovely pale amber-tawny colour with a soft, alluring character on the nose and palate. Silky and seductive with creamy fruit, toasty complexity and lithe length of flavour.

JAMES SUCKLING 94 poiints
Bright amber color with notes of toffee caramel, crushed walnut, orange marmalade, turmeric and praline. Medium body. Bright and vivid on the palate with steady acidity and medium sweetness. Delicious and so lively for a tawny. Almonds, too. Drink or hold.

THE WINE ADVOCATE 92 points
Reviewed by: Mark Squires
Drink Date: 2022 - 2045
The NV 20 Years Old Tawny Porto is a typical Douro blend bottled in August 2022 with a Vinolok cork and 129 grams per liter of residual sugar. For a lot of folks, a 20 Year is the sweet spot in the lineup for Tawnies: It's fresh, so you don't worry about cracking fruit; it's reasonably complex, so it's old enough to be serious; and most of all, it is actually affordable compared to some of the really old ones. This is lovely. Showing a trace of caramel and darker chocolate flavors, this is still dominated by its freshness. Its lively acidity lifts the fruit and allows the flavors to dribble over the palate. It is tightly wound and very focused. It tastes great too, finishing with a touch of sugar and big fruit. That dries out with time and becomes a bit less exuberant and a bit more stern. It acquires a very serious demeanor. It is hard to resist.

The array of age-indicated Tawnies here leads to the presentation of the new 50-Year category. It's worth noting, though, that the last time that I saw the entire array of Sandeman Tawnies, I was a little underwhelmed. For whatever reason—new blends, new releases, no slip-ups in shipping, etc.—these mostly showed better, at least as a group, this time around. The sweet spots here are at the 20 and 30 Year levels, where you get fine quality and decent prices. The 40 Year and 50 Year Tawnies were wines I liked better, but the prices escalated far more quickly than the quality levels. To be sure, that's not unusual as rarity kicks in and causes price spikes, but still. Published: Nov 10, 2022

WINE ENTHUSIAST 91 points
An elegant tawny, perfumed with soft tannins and a good edge of wood acidity and spirit. The wine is dry, densely flavored, tasting mature, showing a good balance between young sweetness and age, with everything well integrated. — Roger Voss

JANCIS ROBINSON 17 points
So let's see how this long-loved wine actually tastes, ignoring its visual makeover. Bright orange transparent tawny. Smells on the cusp of too rancio and concentrated but it's sweet and charming on the palate. Smooth as a baby's bottom and eminently sippable without any food – probably best that way, in fact. Perhaps not as complex as the slightly cerebral Noval 10 year old but this would not disappoint someone looking for a super-smooth, light, long-wood-matured port – so long as they ignored the packaging. (JR)

Farmed Sustainably.