For The Love Of Port

Opened for dinner on Christmas Eve with my wife's family.

Sandeman 30 Year Old Tawny Port

This bottle came in a very nice, very fancy wood box. Definitely eye-catching packaging!

Color: Medium tawny/orange. Very pretty in the glass.
Nose: Restrained fruit and some perfumey alcohol. Relatively closed for a 30-yr old.
Palate: Tart citrus, bright and vibrant oranges, and some vanilla. Very strong acidity. Some faint brown sugar at times, but it's hard to find because it's hidden behind all the acidity.
Finish: Very tart fruits, at this point more lemon than orange. Very long with a slight edge that comes and goes in the middle. Eventually (a couple of minutes) resolves into green apples.

Score: 92 points. I didn't like this bottle as much as the last one because this one had more of a family resemblance to Sandeman's bracingly acidic 20-yr old. It went great with the Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, and gravy that we had for dinner, but wasn't as pleasant to sip on its own due to the acidity.

I had not had this in years until a bottle at Quinta do Seixo during a full tasting of 10/20/30/40 year olds with the 2010 Fortification Tour gang and George Sandeman, before heading on to an amazing array of older Sandeman VPs. I liked this a lot, but am a sucker for Sandeman's Tawnies which for a British shipper is amongst my very favorite producers of Tawnies; their hallmark of which is consistency across all four bottlings.