Port for Wine and Food Pairings or as a Stand-Alone Drink

Port—very often it conjures images of portly, bewhiskered old men reading newspapers, discussing religion and politics, cracking jokes and walnuts, and smoking cigars, all the while hiding out from wives at their gentlemen's club. Maybe that was an accurate description of port drinkers in the past, but today port enjoys a much broader fan base, along with a much extended area of production. And when it comes to wine and food pairings, port is now associated with more than just nuts and tobacco.
Port wine takes its name from the city of Oporto in the Douro River Valley of Portugal and came into being in the late 1600s not by design, but by accident and necessity. In 1678 England declared war on France, blockaded ports, and made it impossible for Englishmen to get their beloved Bordeaux, forcing English wine merchants turned to Portugal for a source of wine. But wine making hadn't the heights in Portugal that it had in France, so the English had to take a hand in it themselves.
To improve these inferior Portuguese wines, which were darker and more astringent, and to make them stand up under rough Atlantic voyages, brandy was added to make them more palatable on delivery. Later, it was learned that brandy added during the fermentation process would stop fermentation and stabilize the wine and further enable it withstand the rigors of travel. And the result was a sweet, high-alcohol-content, rather thick wine known as port.
There are now several types of port: vintage ports, ruby ports, white ports, and tawny ports. Vintage ports have been held in the bottle for at least 10 years to ensure maturity. Ruby ports, on the other hand, are younger wines that still retain their ruby-red color. White ports possess varying degrees of sweetness, with a floral, fruity flavor and lower alcohol content. And tawny ports have been aged for long periods, sometimes up to 100 years, in wooden barrels and so assume an amber hue and a nutty character.
Generally, for appropriate wine and food pairings, port is most often matched up with sweets, cheeses, and nuts. The sweeter ports, vintage and ruby, are usually paired with English Stilton cheese, cheese cake, chocolate, and sweeter fruits like pears and strawberries. Tawny port often finds itself alongside Roquefort and blue cheese, fresh peaches, or caramel-based desserts. But a quality, long-aged tawny port, such as that made by Seppeltsfield, is often best as a stand-alone wine.  
One of the prime production areas for port is now Australia, especially the Barossa Valley in southern Australia. Here, Seppeltsfield produces some of the finest ports in the world, and one of its premier ports right now is the 1910 100-Year-Old Tawny. It is, according to Seppeltsfield, a "full-bodied tawny style, awesome in its power and concentration," and "every drop holds the promise of an exquisite life-enriching experience." And this may just be more than mere hyperbole.
This tawny port produced by Seppeltsfield, having been aged in wooden barrels for 100 years, is an intense and viscous port. It is concentrated, owing to evaporation over those 100 years, and has a burnt-toffee, caramel, nutty character. This is a port that, while appropriate wine and food pairings can no doubt be found for it, is probably best experienced on its own.
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