Taylor Fladgate, 1970

Vintage Port
Excellent Levels

Description and Reviews:
The 1970 Taylor's Vintage Port is a consistently high performer and rated as one of the best of the 1970 ports.

99 points Wine Enthusiast
This wine's dark garnet color with minimal bricking suggests a relatively youthful wine and this certainly could age longer, although it's also delicious now. Wonderfully complex floral and herbal scents easily move into deep, rich flavors of chocolate and cherries, sprinkled with a healthy dose of Douro minerality and spice. Drink or hold. (JC) (2/2007)

98 points Vinous
The 1970 Taylor's Vintage Port has a tight nose, youthful with notes of liquorice, raisin, boot-polish and lemongrass. It is well defined and displays a little more intensity than the 1963. The palate is full-bodied with firm tannins, very cohesive with superb ripeness: wild strawberry, lemongrass, smoke and dates with an incredibly persistent finish. There is an effortlessness to this Port. It has such weight on the finish that it will cruise past another two decades in bottle. Tasted in the Factory House in Porto for 'Taylor's - The Story of a Classic Port House' book. (NM) (6/2018)

98 points Wine Spectator
Clearly lives up to Taylor's superb reputation. Deep ruby, with intense violet and chocolate aromas, full-bodied, with gorgeous fruit flavors, full but well-integrated tannins and an extremely long finish. Amazing balance and finesse. Still needs time. (JS) (6/1989)

96 points Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
This house must certainly be the Latour of Portugal. Their ports are remarkably backward yet still impressive when young. Of all the vintage ports, those of Taylor need the longest time to mature and even when fully mature seem to have an inner strength and firmness that keep them going for decades. Their tawnys are also among the very best, though somewhat expensive. The 1970 fabulous, a broodingly dense-colored, backward port that has all the signs of future greatness, provided one is willing to cellar it until the early 1990s. (RP) (1/1989)

94 points John Gilman
While I have had little recent experience with the 1985 or 1977 Taylor, I have drunk quite a bit of the 1970 vintage over the last decade. This is a vintage of Taylor that has always offered up a more open and easy-going personality, and has been drinking beautifully since at least the early 1990s. Despite its unusual (by Taylor standards) precociousness, the wine has continued to evolve and improve over the last fifteen years, seemingly gaining in depth and purity with each passing year. The bottle we had at our vertical tasting was flat out stunning, offering up a brilliant purity that was also readily apparent in the 1992 vintage. The bouquet is a magnificent mélange of sweet black cherries and plums, black licorice, chocolate, tar, complex soil tones and a nice framing of cedary wood. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, focused and refined, with beautiful mid-palate depth, a firm Taylor structural spine, and great acidity and grip on the very long, complex finish. Even at age thirty-six the wine seems slightly spirity on the backend- I am not sure if this is a function of it moving into a more mature profile, or if this will diminish even more as the years go by. But the ’70 Taylor is a superb bottle by any stretch of the imagination, and offers outstanding value by today’s standards. (1/2007)

Jancis Robinson
Bricky garnet. Slighly darker fruit and some leather too, more savoury and slightly less freshness and not as lifted as the Graham’s. More raisin and Christmas cake sweetness and spice with a velvety texture. Luscious but still quite a bit of firmness. Full of fruit density still and tremendous length. (JR) 18/20 (10/2010)


Robert Parker writes... "This house must certainly be the Latour of Portugal. Their ports are remarkably backward yet still impressive when young. Of all the vintage ports, those of Taylor need the longest time to mature and even when fully mature seem to have an inner strength and firmness that keep them going for decades. Their tawnys are also among the very best, though somewhat expensive. The 1970 is fabulous, a broodingly dense-coloured port that has all the signs of future greatness." Parker Buyers Guide.

Parker rating 96/100 (Outstanding)


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