Editor’s Note: It is rare that I have a guest post on this site (I think there has only been one other). Ya’acov Oryah needs no introduction from me. He is a well known and highly respoected winemaker. I have written a number of detailed posts about his wines over the years. He is also a close friend. I was honored and excited when he asked to post about arguably his most famous creation. It is a wine that I have been enjoying for a number of years whose history has always intrigued me and whose continued development i look forward to. So, without further ado, here is the story from the man who wrote it. -AD

Some time ago, back in 2010, a bunch of winemakers from Israel traveled to Portugal, guest of Amorim, the cork producer. Winemakers worldwide were slowly abandoning natural corks due to TCA contamination. This was effecting Amorim of course, but also the economy of Portugal. So, after much research and heavy investments (with aid from the Portuguese government), Amorim started inviting wine makers from around the world to showcase their research, progress and solutions to avoid TCA.

In our tour, we also visited some Port producers. In one of them, at Graham’s , my dear friend Sam Soroka pulled me aside and suggested (actually insisted) that I order and taste Tawny Ports, which were not on the group’s tasting program. I listened to my seasoned friend, tasted 20yr, 30yr and 40yr Tawny Ports, and a new world of wine revealed itself to me. Fascinating, almost incomprehensible complexity of different nuts, saps, dries fruits and divine nectars, all intermixed, layer upon layer. A wine that I would love to try and make, but it seemed I should have thought of that some 30-40 years earlier. It seemed that making such a wine could exists only in dreams.