ThePortForum.com

Bottled 2021

From 90ml

Started out lighter than the garrafeira alongside but darkened to a purple-red, 60% opaque.

Quite a lot of volatile heft on the nose masking the fruit.

Sweet and rich and luscious on the palate at first but a bit fiery to finish. Coffee. A little quince, late.

Not sure about the balance on this sample. TCA? Theoretically possible under screwcap but very rare. I think it's just badly VA-affected.

I’ve not had VA in this, and I’ve had it a number times over the past 10-ish years, including direct from cask. But it’s always been slow to develop tawny characteristics, as the base product was such a nice Port from a great year. I prefer the 1992 as it’s more developed into a tawny. IMO, this one needs to spend a lot more time in cask to age and perhaps use as a blending component instead.

Yes it's odd isn't it. I had this wine less than a year ago and it was very different and much closer to your description. It definitely wasn't the glass though, as I checked that twice.

I’ve had a couple of sample bottles which have tasted pretty odd and flawed since we started to do this a lot in March 2020. I wonder if the small amount of liquid makes them more susceptible to something going wrong? It’s also made me wonder how they are bottling these: can you run 90ml bottles through a normal production line? Or will they have had to have bought new equipment or outsourced it?

They are probably hand filled. One would need to bottle a lot of them to make it worth the investment of buying a special bottling machine for such a small bottle.

It might be that the bottle was not properly rinsed before use or even that wrong wine was put in the bottle. That I thought there was a fault, but I was unable to be certain which fault, might point towards the former.

Andy Velebil wrote: ↑14:51 Sun 30 Jan 2022 They are probably hand filled. One would need to bottle a lot of them to make it worth the investment of buying a special bottling machine for such a small bottle.

Your post caused me to look at how much a bottling machine costs! I noticed that you can buy quite cheaply (i.e. < £/$/€ 100) a machine for semi-automated filling. You set how many ml you want it to dispense and stick the input tube into your big container of liquid. It then has a foot pump and every time you press it, the liquid is dispense through a second tube which is held in a stand with a little nozzle on the end to make it easy to direct into the bottle. I imagine that with such a machine filling 100 or so sample bottles would only take a few minutes and be much easier that trying measure the liquid by hand.

There is a terrible video of one here from one of the manufacturers.