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A review of the evening as a whole.

Quinta do Vesuvio 2005
Fonseca 1985
Warre's 1983
Warre's 1960
Cockburn 1912

Derek

A very enjoyable evening with some very nice ports. We also enjoyed a new venue in the Crusting Pipe. A private room with good lighting, a socket for plugging in AHBs laptop and a signal for the soon to be activated Crusting Pipe Wireless Internet. The room seats 6 and is now the venue of choice for smaller London offlines.

AHB has taken is usual extensive array of TN's so I will leave him to update you more on the wines.

It was good fun doing the guessing. Three of us even managed to guess to within 36 years for the C1912

Derek

It was a very good evening and a wonderful new room for us to use, secluded but with enough space for comfort - and much better lighting than in the tunnels at the back of the restaurant.

Derek has missed out one of the ports on show at the tasting, the only port not shown blind was a Marks & Spencer's Pink Port. This had been open 6 weeks but Derek assured me that the flavour of the port is not much different from when it was first opened.

The smell was so very familiar but I still can't place it. I think it reminds me of the old sweet rose wines that I used to drink in the '80s and was basically just the smell of strawberry juice. Very sweet taste and very thick texture, full of bubblegum flavours; a bit of a harsh kick when you swallow. Faint aftertaste that was quite pleasant and lasted a while.

I wasn't as horrified with this as Derek has been. It's not going to be my drink of choice in the future but I think that it would be a very pleasant mixer and could make a perfectly serviceable long summer drink with ice cubes and soda.

It was great fun guessing the wines. I came close with a guess of Fonseca-Guimaraens 1986 when the wine was actually a long-decanted and very lovely Fonseca 1985. The Warre 1960 completely flummoxed me, I honestly don't remember what my guess was but I do remember that I had neither the house nor the shipper right. Pity the Warre '83 was corked but at least the Vesuvio and the Cockburn were both lovely.

It was quite good fun watching Derek almost talk himself out of identifying the Vesuvio 2005 and it was great to see consistent guesses from everyone for the Cockburn 1912 that put it close to the war years.

Perhaps we will adopt a similar theme for the April 10th get-together...

Alex

I've just found my notes from the offline on March 18th. I guessed that Derek's Warre 1960 was a Croft 1963! Not so far out that I feel disgraced.

I'm not great at blind tastings, but I do enjoy the fun of trying to guess what a particular port is.

Alex