NV The Nostalia Rare - 375ml

© Peter Broelman

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"This Grenache-based Tawny Port lookalike exhibits fabulous aromas of maple syrup intermixed with roasted nuts and sweet fruits. In the mouth, there are fruitcake flavours, extraordinary generosity, a huge palate, and full-bodied opulence. The colour reveals considerable amber at the edge, but this offering can easily compete with thirty and forty year old Tawny Ports form Portugal, but with sweeter, riper fruit. Great stuff!. "

This old wine style is named The Nostalgia Rare Tawny because of the nostalgic value of very old Tawny Ports (no longer allowed to be called Port). The name ‘Rare’ because the average age of this wine is so old that more has evaporated to the air through the pores of the old wood it lay in, than is left behind. It is also rare to see a wine as old as this.

The wine is a Tawny Port in style although older and more concentrated that many Portuguese Tawny Ports. There is a huge array of characters in this fortified ranging from walnut, cherry, toffee, molasses, caramel, cumquats and marmalade.
Due to the huge evaporation rate of 7% per annum, the wine ends up being quite liquour-like but is not overly sweet because of the huge rancio character (drying mature complex oak character). The flavours of the wine remain with you a long time after consumption.

The Nostalgia is now blended in small, old, oak barrels using a semi-solera system, comprising a base wine and a vast assortment of different parcels of vintage wines and blends. These components have been variously vinified, predominantly from Grenache and Shiraz.
After careful blending of the various parcels to the well-established Nostalgia style, the wine is bottled in small batches at d’Arenberg once each year in an effort to maintain the traditional hallmarks of d’Arenberg’s Nostalgia Rare Tawny; complexity, freshness, intensity and lusciousness.
In recent times, roughly every other vintage, Chester Osborn fortifies small amounts of Grenache and occasionally Shiraz to put more young Nostalgia material in old brandy buttes, barriques and hogsheads at d’Arenberg, to ensure a small and constant supply when introduced to the final blend in future.