You down with LBV, yeah you know me.
How to be a port connoisseur on the cheap with one solid gold recommendation for Christmas Day.
First up a final pre-Christmas plug for my book, Vines in a Cold Climate. I was delighted to have Victoria Moore pick it as one of her books of the year in the Daily Telegraph recently. She wrote:
“This is a tremendously gossipy and adroitly helmed examination of where English wine is today and how it got there. Jeffreys is able to bring seamless historical context together with sharp character observations, plenty of opinion and clever use of the vernacular…”
This week wine merchant Jason Miller wrote a little ode to port which is well worth your time. Despite one horrendous morning after experience, he’s returned to this most fierce of fine wines and is particularly enchanted with joys of a couple of vintage ports from 2000, a Fonseca and Warre’s. The problem with such wines is that they’re expensive, though not as expensive as they really should be, and you need to wait. Indeed at 23 years old both are still young. I was discussing this over dinner the other night, what do you drink while you’re waiting for your vintage port to mature or indeed when like me you can’t afford it?
The obvious choice is tawny - wines that are long-aged in cask and then blended into a house style usually with an age statement. You do get remarkably good wines for the money but the problem with tawny is that it’s too consistent; you always know your Taylors 10 Year Old is going to be wonderful. What I’m looking for, it’s what I’m always looking for, are the kind of wines where you get all the fun of being a proper wine bore, comparing vintages and seeing how things age, but without the expense or waiting for decades.
The answer is LBV - Late Bottled Vintage. These are wines from a single year which are aged for around six years usually in large wooden vats and then bottled. I doubt anyone deliberately keeps such wines but I have discovered from wines cellared by accident that they can last and improve for years. In 2018 I found a Taylor’s 2003 LBV in my father’s drinks cupboard which had mellowed beautifully and tasted like it still had at least another decade in it.
I’ve actually got quite a few LBVs of various ages in my cupboard. Port companies tend to be quite generous with samples. As they have proper corks, I taste them with a Coravin, make some notes, maybe put them in an round-up for BBC Good Food or someone else, and then put them away in the cupboard and forget about them. In our house move, I realised that I had a lot of bottles so thought it was time to start opening some.
The effect of even a couple of years is remarkable. Good quality LBVs tend to be bold and spicy when young but are now starting to develop that red fruit and baking spice note that I love in an old vintage port. I drank the Noval LBV 2013 the other night. It’s clearly got years left in it and I think tasted blind, I would have thought it was something far more expensive. Next up was a Sandeman LBV 2014 and like all good ports it has improved with time open. It started off quite fiery and fruity but by day three had become mellow and delicious. I’m currently eyeing up a bottle of Graham’s 2015 which I remember being lighter and more floral than most LBVs.
If anything the quality of LBV port is too high. Most really benefit from an extra couple of years in bottle and start to make single quinta and vintage Ports look expensive. A nice LBV ranges from around £12 to £20 - the supermarkets often have offers on over Christmas. My advice is to stock up on LBVs now, most of the big brands are excellent though I think Noval probably has the edge for sheer quality, and forget all about them for as long as you can. You don’t need proper storage just in a dark cool cupboard should do. Next time you meet up with your port-loving friends, just ask, you down with LBV?
At the time of writing, Waitrose currently has the Graham’s 2015 LBV for a frankly ludicrous £11.79 a bottle. Buy all you can.
A (chain) wine shop near here has a somewhat weird selection, but they do have a number of Niepoort ports (but no others, and alas, no sherry). The Niepoort LBVs are indeed really good and a very decent value for the price.
*moseys over to my forgotten bottle of fonseca in the cupboard*. Your book is already my go to gift this season for the dorks in my life, but may as well tack on a bottle of port too.