#drinkport | “Who in the World Drinks Port?”

Who in the world drinks Port? I’m thinking it. You’re thinking it. To get to the bottom of it, I reached out to a true wine expert — a Master of Wine — and there are only a few hundred of them in the world.

Richard Heming is a writer and educator whose career in wine has taken him around the world — from the U.K., to Australia, and now to Singapore.

I found Richard when I was interested in exploring the topic about the future of wine and came across an article he wrote about wine in the metaverse. I reached out and he agreed to contribute his insights to #drinkport.

He shared with me in our first conversation that he likes to support the underdog — the underdog being Port and very likely my ambitious endeavor to encourage more Americans to drink it.

Join me for this truly global conversation — I recorded this podcast on a Thursday night in Boston well past my bedtime when it was Friday morning in Singapore. If you want to truly discuss the future of wine and the global perception of it, talk to a Master of wine halfway around the world who quite literally is living in the future.

Read highlights from the transcript below (edited for clarity):

Q: What do you do? What is a Master of Wine?

A: My role now is Head of Wine Asia for Club 67. It's a private members club that has a club here in Singapore. So I'm in the concierge of the Singapore club right now. And we have a club in London, which opened in 2015, a smaller club in Verbier, Switzerland, and then two more coming in Beaune, in Burgundy, and Bordeaux city, with a couple more planned.

My role is to look after everything wine related in the Singapore club. So that goes from buying, storing, logistics, right through to events and marketing. Prior to that, I studied the MW. I was a writer and communicator and educator for 12 years in the U.K. I wrote mostly for JancisRobinson.com. I still write for her website.

Prior to that, I started off in retail. So I have seen different aspects of the wine industry. You mentioned Australia, I did a vintage there, and I also worked at a retail shop in Sydney for a short time.

What is my global perception of Port? I think unfortunately, that as a category, it's frequently overlooked. The history of Port in the U.K. is that while it was very popular a generation ago, if not more, these days it's seen as a seasonal drink at best most of the time. Port prices are undervalued. It's very difficult for Port producers to maintain investment when supermarkets can sell Port at unfortunately low prices. So I think in its traditional markets, the Port category has been looking at alternatives to try and reinvigorate the sector to add value back. And some of them have worked and it's interesting to see those changes.

Globally speaking, I mean, from a Singapore perspective, we're not very representative here at 67 because we're talking to a very wine engaged audience. But I'm pleased to say that we sell a lot of sweet and fortified wine and Port is obviously a cornerstone of that category. We love having large format Ports and we are able to sell dozens by the glass, that's one of our propositions. So people often will have a small glass of something with their meal and we try and encourage that as best we can.

Q: How can Port wine become more mainstream and relevant, especially to the American consumer?

A: It's a loaded question. The straight answer to that is nobody knows. And if they did, they'd be doing it already.

Perhaps exactly what you're doing is what [Port producers’] innovation should be, which is to make it more relevant, more sort of more customized to a particular audience — the American audience — because it has pretty much stayed as a very traditional product. Now that's its strength of course, because there's nothing else quite like it in the world.

It has amazing heritage, so it would be a shame to ignore that. But if you look at what has happened recently in the last, since I've been in the industry 20 years or so, there was a brief moment when rosé Port became a thing. And while that still exists, it is cheap and nobody is really investing in trying to make that a quality product. So I don't think that is the future of Port.

Much more successful has been the rebranding and investment in tawny styles. Now that really is something that I think has got good potential. And there are a couple of reasons why. One is you can drink it chilled. And I don't think you should underestimate how important that is for such a simple sounding difference. But drinking tawny Port straight out of the fridge is just a completely different experience to the old bottle of vintage Port that needs to be decanted and served at room temperature and so on. The fact that tawny is ready to drink straight away and that the various companies have done good jobs innovating with packaging — creating clear glass bottles, different shapes. reminiscent in many ways of what the spirits industry is very good at, making something eye-catching, changing the volume so you don't always have to buy 75 centiliters of the same liquid, which you may not want that much when it's a fortified wine.

And then there are these ready-to-drink categories, white Port and tonic, probably the main one. I think that kind of format is really good innovation. And my view is that anything which gets people interested in wine of any sort is to be applauded. It makes people consider wine as an alternative perhaps to beer or cider or hard seltzer even. Now, those are categories in themselves that find like I have no prejudice against them. But I'm trying to figure out how the wine industry can compete and keep its market share and so on. Port has a potential role there, but it's very, very small. It's always going to be a much minor part of that marketplace.

Q: How are you encouraging younger people to drink more wine?

A: We have a discounted category for under 35s and under 30s in our club. So we try and encourage younger wine fans to join and get on the journey with us. But as you said, it's very hard.

Wine is, I think by its nature something that takes a while to get into. It's unusual to have people in their 20s or even in their 30s who are highly engaged with wine unless they're actually employed in the wine industry.

And tequila, craft beer, all those other categories we've mentioned, they're more accessible, they're more fun, they have more marketing money apart from anything else. I mean, wine has always struggled because it doesn't have huge budgets for that sort of thing. And that's fine. I think the conversation about how younger people are drinking less wine is completely paranoid and actually not. Well, it probably is literally true, but certainly not something to be worried about.

One of my favorite answers to this is that people are older for longer than they're younger. I know that sounds flippant and I don't want to just sort of dismiss younger drinkers at all. I would love a way of reaching those people and encouraging them to drink wine, but I don't necessarily think that it's important. I think people as they get older will develop an interest in wine. Not everyone, but it's much more likely to happen with time than it is with some super trendy celebrity endorsed. brand or anything like that. That is the domain of spirits and maybe Champagne, for example. Champagne can do it. But regular wine can't really do that and I'm not sure that it needs to.

Q: As a Master of Wine, what makes Port wine so special? What's the selling point? What would you tell someone who's never tried Port before?

That's a really interesting question because you could answer that by saying that there's not very much special about Port in the way that it's made. Anybody could do it anywhere. There are other fortified wines made in the same way in different parts of the world. If you have the time and resources, you can go and buy grapes and fortify them with brandy and age them in oak and create a Port-style wine.

The operative word is authentic. So the answer which would make a difference is emphasizing the heritage and the authenticity of Port as a product — not in the way that it's made and not necessarily even in the taste profile. But it's about connecting it with people and places.

If anybody has been to Vila Nova de Gaia and the Douro River and heading up into the vineyards, it's a stunning place. A lot of wine and growing areas are, but there's something particularly dramatic about Port country. It's extremely historic. It has links to British traders, especially, that go back. centuries. The origin of the product itself was to service the U.K. market by creating something that was fortified so that it could withstand the journey back from Portugal to the U.K. And those are the stories that people will connect with.

The fact that so many of the Port company names are British names, they have a kind of trading heritage, you think of Taylor’s, Dow’s, Graham’s. That kind of connection to British culture is a really integral part of what makes Port the attractive wine that it is, I think.

Now, it happens to also be extremely delicious. And I think that there isn't anything quite like it, despite my answer at the beginning, you potentially go out there and make it from anything. I suppose I made that point because I wanted to explain that often people in the wine world get obsessed by scores and points and taste and blind tasting. And that is maximum 50 percent of the enjoyment of Port, if not less. For me, the enjoyment of Port and otherwise is understanding that connection to a place and the people that make it.

Q: Can Port be produced anywhere?

I think right now, if you took the best Port style wines from around the world and put them against a selection of the best Ports, then yes, you'd be able to tell. And that's because Port has the investment, heritage, and incentive to make the very best examples of its kind. Whereas other wine regions — there's quite a few in Australia — for example. Now they're great examples, but they are rarely focused on in the way that people focus on making Port in Portugal. So that means that the Port wines have got a distinctive difference.

If the underlying question is, would it be possible to make something of equivalent quality somewhere else in the world? I think the answer is probably yes.

Let me just qualify that by saying, I don't necessarily think that that's a good thing, or indeed that it can be proven one way or another. Certainly a lot of people would disagree with me. This idea of terroir is sacrosanct in wine, that you can only get something of a certain style from a certain place. It's true to an extent, but I've tasted enough wine from around the world and got wines wrong often enough that I know that it's so, so easy to confuse different wines and different styles and it’s because of the sophistication of wine making. And also exploring new terroirs means that there's loads of potential that is unexplored.

So I think as a theoretical answer, it would be crazy to say that Port can only possibly come from one place. Legally, okay, yes. can only be called Port if it comes from Portugal. That's a good thing. But the idea that you couldn't possibly make it from anywhere else, nobody can say that with certainty.

Q: Do you #drinkport?

A: I'm going to stick with my theme for this conversation, which is that the people are the most important part of any experience. I've been fortunate enough to taste amazing drinks all around the world in the company of complete strangers in totally neutral laboratories, and it's meaningless. It doesn't matter how good the wine is. But you can put a very humble wine in the company of loved ones with an amazing view and a nice simple meal, and it will be the best wine experience you can come up with.

Now, Port has got a very particular application in those contexts. It's not the kind of thing that I think you realistically are going to drink throughout a meal or that you might want earlier in the day.

But the most memorable Port experiences I've had, especially recently, have been from large format bottles, I think that's a really great way of sharing Port.

Here at the Club 67 Pall Mall Singapore, we've got these 15-liter bottles of Port and specifically of colheita Port — so a tawny Port from a single vintage. We've recently been going through a 1997 colheita — a fantastic wine, absolutely beautiful. And we've got this 15-liter bottle on the bar upstairs and you can buy it, you can even just buy a small 25 ml pour or you can have a little bit more if you like. And the idea that has been shared among hundreds of people. And you can go upstairs and have a nice dinner and just have this small amount of tawny Port to finish off your meal… sharing it with hopefully your loved ones or your friends around the table, but then in an incredible room with loads of other wine lovers. — that's a pretty special experience.

Port is kind of contemplative and because it's so sweet and warming, it is a friendly wine, it's easy to understand. It’s a crowd-pleaser. I think it does do exactly that. It encourages people to be more open and talkative and sharing. That's an important part of the conversation, too — is that Port doesn't have to be for everybody. When it appeals to the lovers of those styles, it makes a really strong connection. But it doesn't need to be a mass market product and that’s what makes it special.