NV Churchill Club Tawny

Tasting notes for individual Ports, with an index sorted by vintage and alphabetically.
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Tasting notes for individual Ports, with an index sorted by vintage and alphabetically.
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Glenn E.
Graham’s 1977
Posts: 4172
Joined: 22:27 Wed 09 Jul 2008
Location: Seattle, WA, USA

NV Churchill Club Tawny

Post by Glenn E. »

From a sample kindly sent to me by Justin; tasted blind.

NV Churchill Club Tawny
bottled 2021

Color: medium dark tawny with significant red notes, very clear.

Nose: rather faint, possibly due to temp (pulled from fridge 30 min ahead of tasting). Nose has more ruby notes than exhibited in the color. Lik-a-Stik. Light strawberry with some faint caramelized notes. Faint whiff of Biscoff cookies.

Palate: tastes like a young colheita or possibly a 10YO blend, though it does seem older than 10. I.e. still showing a significant amount of ruby, while definitely headed toward tawny, but not exhibiting enough age to be a 20YO. Smooth, then decent acidity and some faint tannins. Sugars are nicely balanced with the acidity putting it in the off-dry to medium range. (Not medium sweet.) The most prominent fruit seems to be cranberry, with some less-than-ripe raspberry backing it up. There’s also a background note of caramelizing fruits, but not yet caramel.

Finish: pleasant, fairly short, some bitterness from latent cranberry flavor.

Score: 91 points. This is a nice Port, but for my taste it is sitting in that strange realm between ruby and tawny that I generally avoid. Another 10 (or 20) years in wood, please!
Glenn Elliott
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