For The Love Of Port

I was lucky enough to join some fellow wine friends for a fantastic Halloween dinner at The Restaurant at Kellogg Ranch. A fantastic student run restaurant at Cal Poly Pomona University. Among some very nice bottles, including a mini-vertical of Pride wines, I brought this bottle along to compliment their delicious desserts. Decanted about 5 hours by the time we started drinking, and this was also served double blind to the others at dinner and to those students who showed an interest in Port. Guesses ranged anywhere from less than 10 years old to a max of 15 or so years old, no one came close to guessing this was a 35 year old VP. The color was still a deep purple that belied its true age, showing more like a VP from the early 90's. Still fruity on the nose with some secondary notes of licorice in the background. Rich, lush, and deep fruit was silky before plenty of young tannins emerged mid way through. Mouth filling and seductive, with a long rich tannic finish that made it impossible to stop drinking. A fantastic showing, one of the best bottles of this I've had in a long time.
97 Points

I've opened two over the past two weeks with different audiences, (although Glenn was present for both) and with similar results to your bottle. Besides 77SW, there's no other VP from the vintage that is consistently this deeply extracted. I really like the SW too, but find more depth and complexity in the GC. Our scores are a few points apart, but that matters not.

I've opened quite a few of these over the past 4-5 years and I've had a little bottle variation the past couple years. I generally chock that up to storage issues (I didn't buy on release) and a couple years ago it seemed to be in a small "phase" where the fruit closed up a bit allowing the alcohol to show a bit too much. This bottle OTOH has shown what those earlier bottles of this I've had did. So I assume it has started coming out of that small phase and back to it's full potential. Such a sleeper of the vintage...so lets keep this one quiet and all to ourselves lest prices go way up on it.