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Notes: Bottled in 2007. Curious colour: orange / pink in the centre fading almost to nothing (perhaps a touch of very-old green). Very, very cloudy though. Nose is quite subdued. The aroma is complex but very distant: some spice, fruit and perhaps some dried citrus. In the mouth, immediately quite sweet with the sugar mellowing into a toffee-like aftertaste which lasts very long time. Good acidity. Very little fruit. A touch astringent on immediate tasting but it then fades. Not really like any other ten-year-old tawny: it reminds me of a non-commercial colheita or similar rarities. Although it is a long time since I last tried it, I don’t think it has been damaged by bottle-aging and perhaps has improved. Would be interesting to see if their current offering is a little more “commercial” in style.

Date: 7th August 2020

Rated*: P

http://www.jacob-head.com/port/records/ ... -Old-Tawny

* A Note on Ratings

My rating system attempts to answer the question “is this a good Port?” one of three ways: N—No; P—Possibly; or C—Certainly. Ports generally are rated against others of their category. Therefore, a Ruby Port which I rate as C for Certainly good, might not be as good as a Vintage Port which receives the same rating. I sometimes modify my rating with a plus or minus indicating that the Port is better or worse than might be expected for this category.

Previous note from 2011 is available here.

I had coravin’ed this bottle and returned to it tonight, pulling the cork and decanting the rest. It was quite clear that this would need quite aggressive filtering to decant clear so I ran it through a coffee filter. This has had a good benefit of removing the cloudiness and astringency: a notable improvement. Other flavour profiles are really unchanged. I should have done this previously, although it is quite rare for the coravin to pull up a lot of sediment. It usually chokes if there is a lot suspended in the wine and so the very fine sediment that was giving this its cloudiness was really unusual.

Forgive the world’s most drawn-out tasting note but, finishing the decanter tonight, it has fallen to bits and is not nearly as enjoyable as 48 hours ago. I often drink a bottle of Port over a week and so am quite used to them being past their prime by the time I finish them but the decline here is much more steep than I would expect for a young-ish Port, especially a tawny.

My advice: keep for as long as you like; decant; filter hard; and then drink up!

As discussed, the bottle I opened last night required a huge amount of filtration to be drinkable. So much so that I couldn’t finish decanting it before the tasting and left the last couple of inches filtering over night. The attached photo shows how much sediment was produced by, say, 150ml of the Port!