A very good friend brought a bottle of this lovely wine to a recent cheese tasting I had at my home. We tried it with a few cheeses, which I’ll write about later, but the wine (or the port, if you will) was quite delicious. Port, as most know, is a wine from Portugal that has been fortified with brandy (Aguardente) to stop the fermentation of the wine, and to boost the residual alcohol content. Wikipedia has a good article on Port that you can see for more information.
Technically, if you add spirits to a wine, it is made in the port style. I dug around on Clos Pegase website to find out what was added to this particular wine, but there was no information. I’ve e-mailed them to find out (just for the heck of it). On the bottle, it does note that the wine is from grapes from their Palisades estate vineyards. The alcohol content is 18%. The tasting notes on the bottle indicate sweet blackberry fruit, but I found this to be much richer and less sweet than it may have been. I found more dark cherries and very pleasant smoky notes, with licorice, dark fruits, and a mild sweetness. It had a richness as you might expect in a port, but not the richness of a port (maybe because the grape was different? Hmmmm).
All in all, great to have a friend like this! Thanks, Mike!
Bob's Cheese and Wine Blog 