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As a break from tasting 2007 barrel samples, I opened this half bottle as a palate cleanser. What a great choice it was.

From a half bottle. A deeply coloured mahogany, transparent but not pale. Cinammon and cedar wood spiced cherries on the nose, rich and sweet and very inviting. One of those bouquets you can smell for hours. Thick and rich in the mouth, spicy and lively with sweet red cherry juice and great depth of flavour. There are still some tannins, but these are soft and subdued. The aftertaste is very big, concentrated cherries and black coffee beans. This is a big wine, not burly but with lots of life ahead of it and beautifully mature. Decanted for 5½ hours. 93/100. Drunk 15 May 2009.

... so we are definitely looking forward to the Warres tasting, eh? How did you get a word of the 07 tasting in London?

Axel

I don’t usually like adding my notes to other peoples’ but I also opened a bottle of this last night to have a dinner party (along with a 30-year-old 10-year-old Fonseca. Great minds obviously think alike with their choices of port!

From a full bottle which produced a huge amount of thick sediment and decanted for about 24 hours.

I was somewhat disappointed with this. It reminded me a bit of the ’85 but lesser in most regards. Fairly watery on the palate (which I don’t necessary mind) with a slight taste of chocolate and cherry. Perfectly acceptable to drink but it did not grip me in the way that I was expecting it to do.

Hopefully a bad bottle; it will be interesting to compare to one sourced elsewhere at the Warre vertical.