Aha, so here's three different ones to enter:

1) Graham Beck Pinno, Pinotage 2004 (South Africa): I smile as I write this because I know how tough this review is about to be.  To be nice I first want to say I think it's very cool that South Africa has this special grape, pinotage, which was cross-bred on their own soil and is utterly unique to them.  I really hoped I would like it so I could be part of the fan club.  Alas, that isn't going to happen.  This bottle had a very tight dense synthetic cork and I suspect that's necessary to be extra careful the contents don't get any more difficult to drink.  My my, I couldn't stand this wine.  The closest taste comparisons I'd make are hints of cough syrup, thistle, and burnt plastic.  After a glass of it I felt I took some medicine to get over a virus.  I bucked up through the first glass, suffered a night later through the 2nd, and then poured the rest of the bottle out the third night.  The thought did cross my mind that maybe it went bad, but that synthetic cork seems to have made that prospect unlikely.  So, in summary, I really wanted to like wine from this special grape, but I honestly wouldn't drink it if given as a gift.

2) Fonseca Porto Finest Reserve Bin #27 (Portugal) - I remember my dad always really liked port.  He didn't drink often but he kept a bottle or two in the basement and every now and then they came out on special occasions.  I also remember I liked the tast of port back home but since I didn't really drink and it is pretty high in alcohol I generally didn't partake much.  But now that I'm exploring wines I was eager to see how I'd like it.  At the store I deliberately tried to pick the best example of port I could find.  So much was cheap port, so I picked this bottle around $20, also considering this Bin #27 is supposedly ready to drink now and wouldn't require me to wait a long time to sample.  Anyway, I can say I like this my expectations exceed what it delivered.  The first thing to hit me is the higher alcohol.  Next there is a sweatness - and not candy sweet but maybe similar to a wine cooler sweet.  Finally the tast of the wine itself hits me and it's nice but it seems so blended that there really isn't a lot of complexity to this.  I had hoped too this might be a wine with lots of health benefits, however, I read later that port spends very little time in contact with the grape skins and often goes through special maceration to try to get as much out of the skins as it can in the very short window of time.  Basically, then I think port is standard wine which has just started to turn from wine to brandy and then is stopped before it gets too far.  That has it's time and place, but I don't see myself as a brandy (or port) drinker.  OK, once in a while.  At half a glass a night once in a while it will probably take me months to drink away this bottle of Fonseca.

3) Monastrell / 4 by Luis J. Perez 2005 (Bullas, Spain): This was a really cool experiment but it didn't deliver what I hoped.  I was in a nice wine store looking for Las Rocas old vine granacha and they were sold out.  The attendant recommend to try this because it's an old vine monastrell.  I'd never tried monastrell (which I later found out to be the Spanish name for mourvedre).  It's supposed to have an "intense floral aroma".  Well, I like it OK, yes it does have some floral aroma (but not intense).  The closest comparison I'd make is to the Chateneuf de Papf and Comte de Broully wines I already reviewed.  It's not as elegant as the former and not as yeasty as the latter - sort of an imbetween wine.  I will make sure I enjoy drinking the rest of this one, but I'm not eager to repeat this wine right away.

Thanks for reading.