1963 Taylor

[Alex Bridgeman]

9 hours double-decanted.

A Berry Brothers bottling and one which has been in their cellars ever since. Deep red but transparent center, colour holding into the rim. Sweet, ripe fruit nose. A touch of mustiness, brambles and obvious alcohol. Full bodied entry, sweet but with a fierce mid-palate pepperiness from the unintegrated alcohol. The tannins in the mouth are well integrated but the alcohol is fierce. The aftertaste starts with a lot of red licorice and a very hot finish but has good length and development. The heat in the mid-palate spoiled this for me and made a good port poor, certainly below the average of what I would expect to drink this year. Very difficult to predict how this port will develop with the extremely obvious alcohol. I rated this a score of 3/2 for current drinking or 85/100.

[Footnote: On Roy's suggestion we poured the remainder of this wine back into the decanter and came back to it at the end of the evening. With the additional 3 hours of time in the decanter, this wine had changed substantially with the alcohol having integrated beautifully. To me, this was the wine of the night (just) and I thank Paul for letting me have the last glass as a birthday present, but I admit to a bias for this particular port as it was the one I was given as a 21st birthday gift. Scoring after having put this back in the decanter for three hours would have been 9/9 or 94/100 - this will have been one of the 15 best bottles I will taste this year, although probably not one of the best 5.]

[RonnieRoots]

Nice one. I tasted this recently (thanks to Stevie, who brought the bottle), and it was superb. That bottle will most likely end up being in the top 5 of this year.