Daou Dessert Red 2019

Written By Campbell Mattinson
A bottle of daou vintage port 2019 on a white background.

Daou Dessert Red 2019
21% alcohol, cork, Paso Robles/Adelaida/California.

I only had a brief taste of this but there don’t seem to be too many references to it out there so I made a quick note. It’s made mostly with cabernet and, according to the Daou representative that I was sitting next to at dinner at the winery, “It’s a sweet wine for people who don't usually like sweet wine". It tastes of chocolate cake and woodsmoke, blackberry and a freshening hit of boysenberry. It’s sweet but it has a dry, structural backbone, so characteristic of cabernet-based wines. It’s pretty delicious, all told.

  • Apologies for the bottle images. It’s the only one I could find, and it mightn’t be quite accurate.

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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