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Consumed on 20 May 2009 at The Crusted Pipe in a "bring a bottle to share" and 2007 Horizontal offline.

One of 5 samples of the 2007 Vintage tasted in the mini-offline. The tasting was carried out "double blind" (unusually in the scientific sense, as the test administrator, AHB, did not know what he was administrating to us). Hopefully Derek still has the key of which letters was allocated to which shipper .

The original title of this thread is/was 2007 "D" Vintage Port. Once the shipper is disclosed, it will be renamed.

D was the most archetypal of the samples tasted. A huge grip of tannins coupled with a surprising dryness. I wrote "nice but unexciting". Typing now, I'm not sure if that was necessarily a bad thing; perhaps this one will survive for longer than the others?

mmm mayhaps this one is the taylor VVV or the Vesuvio Capaella

Nose: Not over-whelming, but very fine.

Colour: Dark, but no more than one might expect from a young VP

Palate: Dour, restrained, what I expect of a sound VP at this age

Conclusion: The only wine to give me confidence for the long haul.

Best guess: Dow, possibly Graham

Tom

uncle tom wrote: Best guess: Dow, possibly Graham

Tom

Shouldn't those be miles apart in level of sweetness?

Shouldn't those be miles apart in level of sweetness?

Although Dow tends to be billed as a drier style, and Graham sweeter, I believe that the actual difference in sugar levels is normally very small.

The characteristic signatures of the wines that I identify are a dour austere nature to Dow, and a rich, cooked dry fruit nature to Graham. However, some Dow's are a little like Graham, and vice versa..

Tom

Belatedly, my notes on the various samples. "D" was my favourite of the night and the one I felt (with my complete lack of experience!) was most likely to be a long term wine. Very dark, inky red with lots of pepper on the nose. Extremely tannic, but lots of red fruit evident. I wrote "buy" next to this!

I also had a large sample of this which I tasted over the following few nights and noticed some mellowing of the spice. It remained very enjoyable at +5 days.

This was my second experience with the Niepoort 2007, which I've now drunk three times and each time from a fresh bottle. However, in a damning indictment of my palate and memory, I don't think I would have ever guessed what this was. Or I can just claim that I'm never very good at tasting things at off-lines!

- Wow!

This was nothing like that first Niepoort sample, which was more like a lagar sample than a fully fledged port..

..they didn't accidentally send us a sample of the 2008 the first time, did they??

Tom

with regards to sample D I liked the wine but was not really impressed as others were at the May offline. Overall I wrote not a lot about this wine which indicates to me that it just did not tickle my fancy

dark coulour, good Palate, but not great