For The Love Of Port

Tasted at Port & Fran's Chocolates tasting at Fine Wines & Cigars in Redmond Town Center.

2007 Porto Rocha Vintage Port

Dense and opaque with a slightly red hue to the otherwise medium purple color. The nose is a bit tanky, also very grapey. Some star anise as well. Powerful, grapey, and tannic in the mouth. Good acidity makes it juicy. Marionberry, mulberry, and a little red raspberry found with some effort. Heat shows up only in the finish, though it's probably there and just overpowered by the fruit in the mouth. Outstanding. 95-96 pts. A steal for $48/bottle at this tasting. Silly Wineworth's, the only brought 4 bottles with them to the tasting. They'll be delivering my 6-pack next week.

This Port was paired with Fran's Dark Chocolate Imperiales. It worked well, but I break with tradition in that I don't usually think that dark chocolate and Vintage Port work well together. The truffle filling on the Imperiales helped mellow the dark chocolate a bit, though, which allowed the 2007's youthful vigor to stand up to the bitterness of the dark chocolate shell.

Was it Peter or Todd who showed up to do the tasting?

Glad you still liked this one. Were they using printed tasting notes or sheets to help sell their wines?

Neither - it was a woman whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. She had what might have been a Portuguese accent and was very knowledgeable.

FW&C has a white board near the bar, and they write everything down there (and refer to it often) so that people can see it. There weren't any printed listings this time, but (as usual) they did have all the bottles lined up on display for people to purchase. They also had a small table with the Fran's Chocolates available for purchase. Have very low self control, I picked up a box of the smoked salt caramels and the grey salt caramels.

I did renew my membership for another year. It's $60, but I made that back already since renewing saved us $10 off the price of the tasting and $9 off the price of each of the 6 bottles that I bought. I probably would have bought the 2007 Rocha at $57, too, so in this case it was real savings.