For The Love Of Port

We had this Friday night and am a bit perplexed. The bottle says "vintage port"--yet this wine presented intself like a tawny: Red color running towards amber. Aroma offers classic oak smell-tastes of burnt caramel, cherries with a tinge of vanilla. Fruity with heavy oak flavor.

Is any one familiar with this one? Is this normal (we are newbs)? It was decanted for 24 hours, price was $25. Frankly, this one was a bomb at my port club meeting, although a couple liked it. During decanting, it threw off a lot of sediment. On a 1-20 scale, we gave it a 9 as a group---I called it a 6.

Sounds like oxidation to me. Any indication that the cork had dried out? Maybe stood up for a few years? If so, it probably would have seeped a bit when laid back down.

I might have liked it. I usually like VPs when they have aged enough to begin to seem like tawnys. A few years of accelerated (but gentle) oxidation might mimic that.

Could also be heat damage, or a combination of both. If it had been stored upright on the top shelf in a store somewhere for many years, it could easily have a very slight bake to it along with oxidation from the cork getting too dry.

The oak doesn't make any sense to me, though. I wouldn't expect oak in both the smell and flavor unless it had actually been aged in oak, which should not be the case with a Vintage Port. But who knows... wine does strange things sometimes.

I recently bought three mid-nineties vintage ports at bargain prices ($18-$26) from the same store and all of them had this same cooked/oxidized character. In fact, only one of them was even palatable to me. All three bottles had dried out corks that crumbled when I opened them and all three bottles also threw a huge amount of sediment. My guess was that they were standing upright on that shelf for quite a long time in warm temperatures. Sounds like a victim of poor storage.

Thanks for the feedback. It was recently purchased at a store "on sale" and was on the shelf upright. It is not a fine wine store--rather a discount liquor store, so it could have been on the shelf stored upright for a while. The cork was fine, it came out nicely in one piece.

Like people, some bottles of the same age show their years more than others. But I must say this sounds past even the most elderly 1994 I have had. I think Glenn and/or Peter have called this one.

Was this the store you bought it from by any chance?
http://www.thewinebuyer.com/sku24330.html

Yes.