The best port wines to drink this season range from Taylor Fladgate to Symington.

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A tawny port is a non-vintage blend aged for 10, 20, 30 and 40 years before being bottled, adding more character and complexity with each decade of ageing. There is a rare vintage-dated, unblended Taylor Fladgate Single Harvest Tawny, released this month, which is an unblended wine from Taylor Fladgate's famous 1896 crop, which is among Portugal's largest collections of cask-aged wines.

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It was this harvest that signaled a revival in the area after a devastating epidemic of phylloxera in the late 19th century. In the company's cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia, where the wine was aged for 125 years in handcrafted oak barrels, along with the inevitable evaporation that eventually occurs, there were only two pipes worth of the burnished bronze-colored wine left.

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Taylor Fladgate had crafted special Glencairn Scottish-crystal decanters, each with an eight-sided, hand-cut, engraved crystal stopper, and there was just enough liquid to fill about 1,700 of Taylor Fladgate's decanters. Each one was priced at $5,500, and sealed with an eight-sided engraved crystal stopper that was hand cut. As part of the gift set, Taylor Fladgate's 1896 Single Harvest Tawny bottle is enclosed in a cherry wood case, accompanied by a commemorative booklet and a certificate, all individually engraved and inscribed with an eight-sided design by Adrian Bridge, Taylor Fladgate's managing director.

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It is true that this port, with its stewed-plum bouquet and flavors of cedar and candied apples, has an extraordinary ability to linger on the palate for a prolonged period of time, which is entirely fitting for a port of its age.

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There are six Symington 2018 Single Quinta Vintages that have just been released this year, each coming from its own farm within the highly regarded Symington Family Estates, one of the world's largest port producers. As we leap from 19th to 21st century vintages, we arrive at the six just-announced Symington 2019 Single Quinta Vintages.

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It was an erratic growing season in the Douro, with about half as much rain as is usually expected in winter and almost none in summer, which led to the longest harvest in the past few years, which produced a small volume of wine with fantastic depth and complexity due to the erratic nature of the growing season. Since the wines were considered too spectacular to blend into one classic vintage, the winemaker at Symington, Charles Symington, bottled each fifth individually.

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Among the wines Dow's Quinta da Senhora da Ribeira $75 and Quinta do Vesuvio $85 will be offered in a limited-edition Single Quinta Vintage set $400 which is composed of bottlings from 2009 and 1999 as well as the elegantly floral 2019 Dow's Quinta da Senhora da Ribeira $75. Several Quintas, including Graham's Quinta dos Malvedos, Dow's Quinta do Bomfim, Warre's Quinta da Cavadinha, and Cockburn's Quinta dos Canais, will be released in the future.