2022 Niepoort Vintage Port

Niepoort’s 2022 Vintage Port comes from very old vines in the Cima Corgo zone (mostly around Pinhão), all made in lagar with 100% full clusters and matured in large (5,000- to 10,000-liter) oak vats. Dirk Niepoort wants a combination of powerful, classical vineyards with others he likes because of their elegance. The wine has a lot more finesse, but it’s a little backwards and closed and took a good couple of hours to take off. It’s chewy and long, with a lot of tannin, but the tannins are very refined. It has power and concentration; Niepoort wants a lot of concentration, unlike in the table wines, but the wine has an ethereal quality to it. Power and lightness—it’s a wine that dances and has the energy of a ballet dancer, very long and with a dry finish. It has some 95 grams of sugar, less that it usually has, and the sugar is very integrated. They produced 35,000 bottles. It was bottled in June 2024.