#drinkport | “Who’s Obsessed with Port Wine?” (Part I)
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone — especially an American — more passionate about Port wine than Roy Hersh.
He’s practically dedicated his life to learning more about this unique fortified wine and is actively sharing it with others through his robust writing career, his popular website ForTheLoveOfPort.com, and the launch of his wine tourism business, Portuguese Wine Tours.
Just how devoted is he to Port wine? He relocated from the States, from his home in Seattle, to live in Porto, Portugal full-time. He’s tasted nearly 15,000 bottles of Port over the last 40 years and even named his daughter Taylor after one of the founding Port houses.
In this first episode from our conversation, I catch up with him to learn more about his background, what inspired his interest in Port wine, and of course, see what he has to say about Americans and their relationship with Port through the years.
Preview the two-part episode here and watch the first part of our conversation below:
Read highlights from the first part of our two-episode conversation below (edited for clarity):
Q: If you could invite one guest, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you choose?
A: My choice would be Bartholomew Broadbent. He lives in Virginia. In 1994, I had been working for Marriott Corporation, and they divided the company into two. It was the first American company to do so, and I decided that instead of taking the promotion I was offered because I had worked for them for a bunch of years at that time, I wound up writing to Bartholomew, knowing his reputation in the U.S.
He was working for Premium Port Wines at the time, and his father was a very famous winemaker who started Christie's Wine Auctions, the first wine auctions in the world. Bartholomew had moved from the U.K. to the U.S. to start up the importership for the Symington family. So I wrote to him and asked him for some help in planning my trip to Portugal. And he was extremely helpful, and without him, my trip would never have been anywhere near as good. And the contacts that he helped me with in Portugal were life changing.
Q: You're one of the leading Port wine experts in the world. What inspired your journey into Port?
A: My journey into the world of Port wine started 40 years ago. I was working at a restaurant in New York City. It was 1983 and we had on tap — one of the very earliest Cruvinet (wine preservation) systems in the U.S.A. at a restaurant called The Water Club in Manhattan — a 1963 Sandeman by the glass and 40 years ago that wasn't something that was very common, certainly not for Port. Every time the sommelier opened the bottle, he would call me in to help with the decanting and I'd get to take a sip just to see how it was. That was my very earliest Port experience and I fell in love with it from pretty much the first time I ever tried it. Sandeman '63 was a great Port to begin with but I started trying others as well and started to collect a couple of years later.
It wasn't until 1994 that I visited Portugal for the first time. Eleven years later I had finally saved up enough money to get to Portugal and I spent three weeks there with my girlfriend. We first went to Lisbon and then went up to Porto. We spent a week in Porto and then in the Douro for another week. For me, it was the trip of a lifetime.
It took me long enough to get over to Europe. I was 37 at the time and 26 when I first started drinking Port. I immediately returned to the U.S. and started writing about Port. At that point, I had probably read more than 20 books on Port (at this point, I’ve read about 60-70 books on Port — pretty much most that have ever been published in the English language).
In 2003, based on my writing about Port wine and Madeira to a lesser extent, I wound up being inducted into the Port Wine Brotherhood and I was the second American that year who had been brought into the Brotherhood so I felt honored. I quit my day job and started writing about Port full-time.
Q: You lead a tourism business, which you launched in 2005. What would you tell someone who is totally new to Port wine?
A: There are a lot of people who say, 'I don't like Port; I don't like sweet wines; I don't drink dessert wines,' until they try one. And I have found so many people who, when it comes to tours, pretty much say, 'You know, I don't want to drink Port,' and then I watch them try it and most people say it’s great. ‘I didn't know I liked Port. I didn't think I liked sweet wine. This is really good and it's not as sweet as I thought it was going to be.' So I think it appeals to many more people than are aware of their propensity to enjoy dessert wines.
Port itself has a ton of different categories. People often think of the ruby Ports, LBVs, and vintage Ports but there are white Ports, and aged white Ports. There are all kinds of different wood-aged Ports from Colheitas, which are single-year tawny Ports where all the grapes come from a single harvest, and then there are Ports that are 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years old and are blends that replicate what a vintage Port would be like at the same age.
The U.S. really came into focus in the mid-1990s. Cigar Aficionado magazine became popular and at that time, around '96-97, when the 1994 vintage first became extremely popular in the United States, I give full credit to Cigar Aficionado for changing the mindset, it was also a boom time in terms of the financial world — both the advertising industry in the United States and Wall Street was going bonkers. It was a good time for Port to get really set in the U.S. and for the first time in history, vintage Port and Port in general was purchased in larger volume than in the U.K. and that was 1996 — the first time and the last time that a vintage (which was '94) ever surpassed the U.K.
Port started to become known in the U.S. in the '90s. It wasn't really popular yet, but over the last 25-30 years, that’s changed. I wouldn't say it's a mainstay or mainstream today but you find restaurants all over the U.S. that have Port on their dessert wine lists along with Madeira, which is more shelf stable.
Port has really come a long way. It's not just paired with dessert nowadays. I know people who drink it with fried chicken or sushi — a lot of interesting pairings. I have friends who drink nothing but Port.
And there are drier styles. Not all of it is sweet, there are dry whites, there are what's called both medium sweet and medium dry, so there's a range of it as well as super sweet ones called Lágrima and so there are tiers. There are many different categories of Port wine for people to try.
Q: What’s the best entry-level Port wine for Americans interested in trying it for the first time?
A: It's easy for a Port geek or Port snob to look at Port very differently than someone who's trying it for the first time and I always tried to get people started with not just basic ruby Ports but LBV because vintage Ports are somewhat expensive — comparatively three times the cost your average LBV. LBVs are about $25 and today, vintage Ports when they're released are about $75 on average in the United States.
Q: Tell us more about LBV (late bottled vintage) Port and why it’s a great place to start for the newbie American Port wine drinker.
A: An LBV is kept in wood for four, five, or six years depending on the producer and some have recipes where it's always four years. Others decide to let the grapes speak for themselves and, to pick a name out of the sky, Quinta do Crasto, they decide okay this year our LBV is going to sit in wood for four years, this year six, next year let's wait and see what it is and maybe that one's five. I like that. Let the grapes do the deciding of how much wood it needs.
They sit in the wood. The wood is neutral and gives no flavor, and imparts a little bit of color but not much else because they're neutral casks. And at that point, they are then bottled and wind up going in bottles. If they're filtered, they're meant to be consumed immediately. If they're unfiltered, and most of the Portuguese ones are unfiltered, they wind up being able to have some sediment in the bottle, which requires decanting but they age in the bottle quite nicely even 20-30 years is not uncommon for those who like that style and prefer to have more mature wines.
I love LBVs because you're getting something at the same exact price with eight years of total age and they show differently — there's more complexity but they're rubies in style. They're still ruby-colored to a lighter pale red depending on how much age they have to them. They're delicious. They have a lot of red fruit flavors and purple plum-type essences… I wish I was drinking Port right now.
Q: What other influences aside from tourism are contributing to Port wine's popularity, especially among Americans?
A: None! I’m kidding. Tourism has grown and I'm just going to touch on my tours. I don't want to push my own agenda here but I will mention them quickly.
In 2005, I started a tour company and had a Portuguese partner who had worked for years in America as basically the liaison between the Port Wine Institute (which is the IVDP nowadays because they also regulate table wines as well as Port). And so the two of us started our tour company with two guests in 2005 during the Port wine harvest and now we generally have between 12-16 guests per tour. We never go with more than 16 because of the size of the tours we're able to accommodate our guests with and the number of Ports they're going to drink in a week.
Our company has grown to the point where we had four private tours and four of our own tours in 2023. Prior to this, five years ago, we were doing two or three tours a year.
We tour 13 of Portugal's 14 wine regions. We do table wine tours, we do island adventure tours where we go to the Azores and Madeira, we do full week-long tours, and we let people create their own tours if they want to bring a group of friends and create their own tour where we go to multiple regions or focus just in one part of Portugal. But our essence has always been the Douro Valley and Port, and still is.
I love it here in Portugal. The tourism factor has grown exponentially in the last decade. From about 2010, it was still sleepy and we had been doing tours for several years at that point. It peaked in 2019 — it hit an all-time high and then Covid came.
American tourists came to Portugal in larger numbers for the first time ever than to Italy or France, which is mind-blowing. Italy and France have been the number one and number two tourist destinations back and forth for 40 years of record keeping and in 2022, Portugal, for the first time ever, blew both of them off the map in Europe.
Listen to the second part of our conversation here.
