The Godfrey Spence Collection
The late Godfrey Spence’s wine collection is now available in our November Fine & Rare Wine Auction.
A member of the team at The Whisky Exchange Great Portland Street, Godfrey Spence was an extremely well respected member of the wine industry and The Whisky.Auction were united in the sadness of his passing in March 2024. Amongst the auction team, past and present, Jeremy Lee knew him best.
One of the pleasures and privileges of working at Whisky.Auction is the opportunity afforded to take a look at the collections of knowledgeable sellers and, in the process, get a handle on the kind of bottles they were drawn to. To discern their buying rationale and tastes – saluting them along the way for the rarities they have managed to squirrel away, and being wowed by curios that demonstrate their connoisseurship.
The collection of our Whisky Exchange colleague; the author, wine educator and fortified wine authority, the late Godfrey Spence, ably demonstrates this point. Like many of those who entered the UK wine and spirits trade in the mid to late 1990s, I was lucky enough to be given my introduction to the wonderful world of fortified wines by Godfrey as one of thousands of students to pass through the Five King’s House classrooms of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, located by Southwark Bridge next to the river Thames.
Although well-spoken and immediately recognisable to the class as hugely knowledgeable, Godfrey was both down-to-earth and fun, and conveyed to all of us that his chosen area of expertise, fortified wines, had been shaped by, and were often responsible for shaping the centuries across which they had evolved. Every bit as importantly, he filled his students’ glasses with, perhaps, their first glass of bone-dry Manzanilla sherry or a luscious, refined Colheita port. It is no exaggeration to say that life-long passions for some of the wine worlds’ greatest (and often most ludicrously under-valued) wine styles were formed as a result.
Later in Godfrey’s career he came to be a regular fixture working for 8 years for The Whisky Exchange in Great Portland Street, where, according to Retail Area Manager Alex Huskinson, he was ‘an inspiration to many people…always generous with his considerable knowledge, with an anecdote for every occasion. Funny, kind, and generous (did I say that already?).’
In the Whisky.Auction November Wine and Spirits we have those bottles that Godfrey collected over the years, ready to be passed on to new homes. Here are my picks of some of Godfrey’s wines from our November wine auction.
Check out the full list of bottles from the Spence collection here.
Cheers, Godfrey!
It was inevitable that Port would form the central core of Godfrey’s collection. I particularly enjoyed his focus on individual vintages and shippers, where both horizontal and vertical runs of bottles are represented. These enable wine lovers to, in the former case, try a range of wines from different producers from the same vintage, or in the case of the latter to try the same producer but from different vintages. Ramos Pinto, a shipper founded in 1880 now owning around 360 hectares of vineyards in the Douro region was clearly a Spence favourite, and the 1997, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2011 vintages are all here.
1955 was, according to the late Michael Broadbent MW, ‘a vintage of quality and quantity, to meet an equally ripe and responding market’. Here we have a brace, in the form of the powerhouse that is Taylor’s 1955, apparently the only vintage to be declared by the shipper in the 1950s, versus the fragrant delights of Cockburn’s. Both wines still receive rave reviews from tasters professional and amateur online despite nudging toward their seventh decade.
1977 was, as all port fans know, a widely-declared and extremely highly regarded vintage, which benefitted from a tropical autumn that brought the crop in the Douro to perfect maturity, with a tannic backbone that has held them in good stead. Around 20 shippers declared – but not Cockburn’s! Godfrey, however, was a man with contacts, and acquired two of the 1000 or so bottles of Not Officially Declared (for commercial release) 1977 Cockburn’s. Here’s your opportunity to grab one.
1985 was possibly the next vintage after 1977 where the stars truly aligned in the Douro, with a broad declaration of 26 shippers and resulting wines almost too generous and easy to enjoy upon release. They have stood the test of time, however, and this collection includes titans that are Graham’s and Fonseca, alongside the inevitably leaner, but still gorgeous Ferreira.
It wasn’t simply mature classics that featured in the Spence cellar. I was delighted to discover a pair of bottles of 2011 from Quinta Do Noval, a shipper who for many is considered the pinnacle of excellence when it comes to vintage port. The 2011 harvest had an uneven start at flowering, reducing the yields by 15%, but continued with a fierce spell of sunshine and drought conditions, followed by five ‘perfect’ weeks thereafter. The gloriously-fruited and exquisitely structured results have already borne comparison with the truly historic twentieth century greats, such as 1908, 1927, 1945 or 1963.
Godfrey’s collection has both a ‘regular’ bottle of Noval, and a 2011 Quinta do Noval Nacional, harvested from pre-phylloxera vines. The Romanée Conti of vintage ports, it is one of those labels destined to catch out the unwary retailer, sommelier or wine buyer, the difference on the labels amounting to a single word ‘Nacional’ (e.g. this is the produce of Portugal at its most unadulterated – no foreign rootstocks here!), but with that single word potentially adding more than a thousand pounds at retail due to the rarity and brilliance of the bottle’s contents.
Few connoisseurs stick rigidly to their speciality or region (though it was great to see Portugal’s most revered but seldom-seen unfortified red wine represented, in the form of 1995 Barca Velha), and there were plentiful well-chosen bottles from further afield. Bordeaux included a quartet of left-bank clarets from the legendary 1982 vintage; Léoville Las Cases, Lynch Bages Cos D’Estournel and Gruaud Larose. These were canny buys; although not ‘First Growths’, with corresponding prices, each one is nonetheless up there with the best of them, with the Gruaud Larose a Robert Parker 100-pointer, no less.
Other highlights for me include 1990 Filhot Crème de Tete, a special, one-off blend released by the Château of the best barrels from a vintage with the highest sugar levels in Sauternes since 1929, and a bottle of the equally decadent 1993 Tokaji Royal Tokaji Aszu Nyulaszo, acclaimed by Decanter magazine as a Wine Legend. This was harvested from the 12 hectare ‘first growth’ Nyulászó vineyard, with the resulting wine containing 218 grams per litre of residual sugar, which is probably an appropriately sweet spot to conclude.