NV Graham's Tawny Porto 10 year

Full cork-stoppered bottle 1,566 g in a robust cardboard tube for gifting.  Dark fox red. With rather an ethereal nose, this somehow manages to be somewhat delicate! A very refreshing tawny with real persistence. You could almost drink this as an aperitif. If it were a Madeira, it would be a Verdelho. VGV at the reduced prices. (JR)

Full bottle 1,574 g.  The moment I tasted this wine, I was there in the enormous space of a hundred-year-old, scuffed-parquet-floored, dusty school hall filled with earnest teenage boys in green blazers lustily singing 'We wish you a merry Christmas', in the scorching heat of an African December. The sound of a slightly out-of-tune, battered piano thumping along to sweaty enthusiasm. Every year we made the annual trip (a long, long car ride that rattled bones and mostly involved watching skinny donkeys and chickens eke out an existence along the pot-holed roadside) to Plumtree, a boys' boarding school in the 'bush' (ie middle of nowhere) on the border between Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Botswana founded by a railway mission in 1902, where my father had gone to school. Their school traditions back then were all English, especially at Christmas. I'd never tasted the figgy pudding that this Christmas carol so richly referenced, but somehow, in my child's mind, I had imagined it a thousand times: dark and sweet and dense and sticky. Now, after nearly three decades of English Christmases, I have my own fig tree, a fierce love of tiny green-gold figs and a secret love for fig jam piled on top of Greek yogurt. I don't imagine what figgy pudding tastes like. I know. And yet when I tasted this wine, I was catapulted to Zimbabwe: 'so bring us some figgy pudding... '. So here we are with the 10 YO Tawny: fig jam, figgy pudding. Lovely dark-red tones too – if you can imagine licking damson syrup off a cello; or the deep orange-red of membrillo off a lace of liquorice. It's very sweet but very fresh. And don't judge me, but it really is wonderful well chilled with popcorn. VGV (TC)

RS 110 g/l. Still quite a bit of red in this colour – almost more garnet than classically tawny, in fact. Smoke almonds and fig on the nose – lovely! Liquorice, milk chocolate, a touch of herbal complexity. There is so much going on here. This seems to be particularly impressive for a 10-year-old. (RH)