Sercial, Blandy’s Madeira 1989

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.