1970 Taylor Vintage Port

SKU #980061 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 Wine Advocate

A deep garnet core with a faded brick rim. The nose is still tight, youthful with notes of liquorices, raisin, boot-polish and a little lemongrass. Again, very well defined and a little more intensity than the -63. The palate is full-bodied with firm tannins, very cohesive with superb ripeness: wild strawberry, lemongrass, smoke and dates with an incredibly long, persistent finish. There is an effortless nature to this port and having encountered this several times, this is undoubtedly the best bottle I have had. It has such weight on the finish that it will cruise past another 20-25 years in bottle. It just has the edge over the great -77. (NM) (8/2005)

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. (NM) (6/2018)

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)