1989 Sercial

Bottled 2024. That's a nuclear warhead of a nose: it detonates with relentless fruit plus mahogany, caramel and smokiness. It's intensely dry and with the strongest, nuttiest complexity. There is no deterrent! (RH)

Wow. This dry sercial has insane, multidimensional aromas of roasted orange rind, toast and dried fruit with a touch of varnish. The palate is austere, dry, sharp and almost severe, but so seductive and complex overall. This has the same amount of residual sugar (55 g/L) as a seco, but the sharpness, enhanced by volatility derived from the long and warm aging, is more acute. So much personality. This was aged up to a month in a canteiro system, in 650-liter American oak barrels. A truly unique wine. Drink now or hold.

Tasted from a 50-cl mini sample. Sercial grapes from Calheta. Aged in the canteiro system, in 650-litre casks at room temperature until bottling. TA 10.77 g/l, VA 1.1 g/l, RS 55 g/l, pH 3.34. 204 half bottles, 1,137 75-cl bottles, 48 magnums, 15 jeroboams, 3 melchiors (18 litres). Harvest winemakers António Serôdio and João Pedro Ramalho, bottling winemaker Francisco Albuquerque. One of Blandy's 2024 releases. Starting to turn rose mahogany in colour, this bone-dry-tasting wine is a slam-and-judder of storm. It's ginger root and rain-soaked peat and storm-slashed rocks and salt on bleeding lips. It's rust and tamarind and the roar of a restless black sea crashing, curling, foaming around jagged rocks. When you taste this wine, you taste it in your chest, in your breath, in your lungs. It's exact. Uncompromising. Like a Sylvia Plath poem in a glass. (TC)