2025: 19th Feb. Niche interesting bottlings

[Alex Bridgeman]

Organising thread.

Wines tasted were definitely niche!
1984 Graham Malvedos
1984 Real Companhia Velha
1984 Warre Cavadinha
1984 Taylor Quinta de Vargellas
1984 Fonseca Quinta do Panascal
1984 Dow Bomfim
1984 Fonseca Guimaraens
1999 Quinta do Portal
1970 Taylor
1999 Graham Malvedos
1975 Mackenzie
1995 Osborne
1962 Sandeman
1975 Rebello Valente
1932 Gonzalez Byass
1970 Krohn
1960 Diez Hermanos
1987 Fonseca Quinta do Panascal

[Alex Bridgeman]

Links to tasting notes are all complete. Please post your thoughts on the niche wines when you can.

[hadge]

thank you Alex for creating this thread.

Rob had come up with a very fun theme, so when I took over I wanted to keep with the spirit of this theme but removing the old reliable part, as my blind bottles fitted this.

I decided to split the tasting into 2 parts.

We started with my 7 blind bottles, these were all from the same vintage. These had been decanted in the morning and then taken to the Boot & Flogger before lunch. they were placed in the fridge until just before the tasting.

Then there was the scoring, then which vintage before a different way to guess the port. I would give the shipper and people had to pick out which bottle they thought it was.

This caused some entertaining guessing. A shout out has to go to Michael C and George for getting 5 out of 7 right.

There was a clear winner in the DB84.

my view on the 1984's, beforehand I thought that most of the 1984 ports where going to be rubbish, I was quite surprised by their turn out on the night. 3 to 4 very drinkable with only one completely undrinkable (RCV). The Dow was the real surprise, with Graham's closely following it. One interesting note is the two Fonseca's were completely different in style, if you voted for one, you generally didn't vote for the other.

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The second part of the tasting,

This was a very interesting group of ports, I think that I can understand why there is no tasting notes for most of these. There wasn’t anything that I would rush out and buy. I would have to say it was the worst bottle of Taylor 1970 that I have ever had, I'm not sure it was Taylor 70.

We scored this and then we did a guess the vintage to see who could get closes for a bit of fun, this wasn’t recorded.

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[Alex Bridgeman]

Now with the 1975 Rebello Valente included in the list. Thanks for catching the miss Neil!