Forgotten Barrel's Legacy Tawny

​On a recent visit to Forgotten Barrel, Doc Ed and I had the great fortune to be taken by the owner, Rodger Grove, to their barrel room where we were given the opportunity to taste their fortified aged wine, Legacy 32 Tawny Solera.  Note that it is really a tawny port, but port is a trade name and its use is highly restricted.  Anyway, the wine is extraordinary.  It also has a very interesting story.
Rodger purchased the winery from the Ferrara family back a few years ago.  Back in the barrel room he discovered this very, very large oak barrel (see picture below), and, much to his surprise, found it half full of aged, oxidized, fortified red wine, i.e., tawny port, though it cannot be named tawny port….  One way of making tawny port or a wine that looks like tawny port, smells like tawny port, and tastes like tawny port but cannot be named tawny port, is to use the Spanish solera concept.

​The solera system in Spain is used to make Sherry.  Wine is fortified by adding distilled wine (like brandy), then put into a barrel for aging.  But it is generally not an empty barrel.  Rather, it has been used to age wines from earlier vintages, some of which has been poured into another barrel to make room for the new wine.  Now the second barrel also contains wine from previous vintages, and some of it has been poured into yet a third barrel to make room for the wine from the second barrel.  There is a final, or bottom, barrel from which wine is removed for bottling.  Hence none of the wine has a vintage.
The technique is also used for Port, Tawny Port, and Marsala wines, among others.  In the case of Forgotten Barrel, the bottom barrel is huge.  If you look again at the large barrel picture you can see how it dwarfs other barrels seen behind the giant.  Wine is aged in the smaller barrels, then added to the large barrel when wine is removed for bottling.  It is not clear how long the wine has been aging, but it is pretty tawny so it most likely has been more than thirty years.  If the barrel has been around since the beginning of the Ferrara winery in 1932, some of the wine may be ninety years old!