Ratings & Tasting Notes:

No critic scores specific to this exact bottling and vintage were found at the time this listing was created.

Cult Wines International Notes:

Jim and Imogene Prager left Orange County in the late 1970s, where Jim had worked as a commercial casualty insurance broker, and founded Prager Winery & Port Works in St. Helena in 1979. Nearly half a century later it remains a small, entirely family-run operation, and one of very few American wineries to have staked everything on fortified wine. Royal Escort is the flagship: a vintage-style Port made from Petite Sirah, a grape the Pragers found suited the style far better than convention suggested. It gives the wine a dense, almost opaque purple colour in youth, a boysenberry and blueberry core rare in Portuguese port, and enough tannin and structure to carry decades in bottle. Alongside it the family makes the Noble Companion tawny and the unusual Aria white port from Chardonnay, several of them named for their grandchildren.

1995 was an excellent year in Napa Valley: a wet winter and cool spring cut the crop, and a long, temperate season let what remained ripen slowly and completely. Small yields and concentrated fruit suit a fortified wine particularly well. Three decades on, the advantage of Port over table wine shows plainly, since spirit and sugar preserve where they would otherwise fade. Expect a deep garnet turning toward mahogany at the rim, and sweet fruit long since dried into fig, date and black cherry, layered with chocolate, coffee, walnut and warm spice. Serve at cellar temperature with dark chocolate or a hard, salty cheese.

Bottle Size:

750 mL

Storage History:

Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.

Condition:

Please note: The bottle shown is the exact bottle being sold.

Outstanding condition.